Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values

As measures of interobserver agreement for both nominal and ordinal categories, Cohen’s kappa coefficients appear to be the most widely used with simple and meaningful interpretations. However, for negative coefficient values when (the probability of) observed disagreement exceeds chance-expected di...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tarald O. Kvålseth
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2015-01-01
Series:Journal of Probability and Statistics
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/751803
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1832556342458449920
author Tarald O. Kvålseth
author_facet Tarald O. Kvålseth
author_sort Tarald O. Kvålseth
collection DOAJ
description As measures of interobserver agreement for both nominal and ordinal categories, Cohen’s kappa coefficients appear to be the most widely used with simple and meaningful interpretations. However, for negative coefficient values when (the probability of) observed disagreement exceeds chance-expected disagreement, no fixed lower bounds exist for the kappa coefficients and their interpretations are no longer meaningful and may be entirely misleading. In this paper, alternative measures of disagreement (or negative agreement) are proposed as simple corrections or modifications of Cohen’s kappa coefficients. The new coefficients have a fixed lower bound of −1 that can be attained irrespective of the marginal distributions. A coefficient is formulated for the case when the classification categories are nominal and a weighted coefficient is proposed for ordinal categories. Besides coefficients for the overall disagreement across categories, disagreement coefficients for individual categories are presented. Statistical inference procedures are developed and numerical examples are provided.
format Article
id doaj-art-76edf271057b494183b01a31e2a10ce4
institution Kabale University
issn 1687-952X
1687-9538
language English
publishDate 2015-01-01
publisher Wiley
record_format Article
series Journal of Probability and Statistics
spelling doaj-art-76edf271057b494183b01a31e2a10ce42025-02-03T05:45:38ZengWileyJournal of Probability and Statistics1687-952X1687-95382015-01-01201510.1155/2015/751803751803Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative ValuesTarald O. Kvålseth0Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USAAs measures of interobserver agreement for both nominal and ordinal categories, Cohen’s kappa coefficients appear to be the most widely used with simple and meaningful interpretations. However, for negative coefficient values when (the probability of) observed disagreement exceeds chance-expected disagreement, no fixed lower bounds exist for the kappa coefficients and their interpretations are no longer meaningful and may be entirely misleading. In this paper, alternative measures of disagreement (or negative agreement) are proposed as simple corrections or modifications of Cohen’s kappa coefficients. The new coefficients have a fixed lower bound of −1 that can be attained irrespective of the marginal distributions. A coefficient is formulated for the case when the classification categories are nominal and a weighted coefficient is proposed for ordinal categories. Besides coefficients for the overall disagreement across categories, disagreement coefficients for individual categories are presented. Statistical inference procedures are developed and numerical examples are provided.http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/751803
spellingShingle Tarald O. Kvålseth
Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values
Journal of Probability and Statistics
title Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values
title_full Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values
title_fullStr Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values
title_full_unstemmed Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values
title_short Measurement of Interobserver Disagreement: Correction of Cohen’s Kappa for Negative Values
title_sort measurement of interobserver disagreement correction of cohen s kappa for negative values
url http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/751803
work_keys_str_mv AT taraldokvalseth measurementofinterobserverdisagreementcorrectionofcohenskappafornegativevalues