Type III error - Wikipedia

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2021-05-24 18:30:04

In statistical hypothesis testing, there are various notions of so-called type III errors (or errors of the third kind), and sometimes type IV errors or higher, by analogy with the type I and type II errors of Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Fundamentally, Type III errors occur when researchers provide the right answer to the wrong question.

Since the paired notions of type I errors (or "false positives") and type II errors (or "false negatives") that were introduced by Neyman and Pearson are now widely used, their choice of terminology ("errors of the first kind" and "errors of the second kind"), has led others to suppose that certain sorts of mistakes that they have identified might be an "error of the third kind", "fourth kind", etc.[a]

In systems theory an additional type III error is often defined:[2] type III (δ): asking the wrong question and using the wrong null hypothesis.