Say our sample consists of about a hundred Belgian (x = 0) and Swiss (x = 1) chocolate bars. We test them to see if they have safe (y = 1) or lethal (y = 0) levels of arsenic. As it turn out, 90% are safe. We then regress y on x with OLS to check whether the country of origin is correlated with safety:
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y | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
swiss | -.9 .3030152 -2.97 0.004 -1.501248 -.2987522
_cons | .9 .0301511 29.85 0.000 .8401736 .9598264
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Goodness! I'm never going to eat a Swiss chocolate bar again. The point estimate is exceedingly large, and the test is exceedingly significant. But looking at the data more closely, there is only one Swiss bar in our sample. It so happens that it is unsafe.
In other words, if the null hypothesis is true (i.e. x is uncorrelated with y), and if we were to repeat this experiment arbitrarily many times with a single “x = 1” observation in each sample, then 10% of the time our model would lead us to reject the null with 99.6% confidence (i.e. a type I error).
The result seems misleading.
- Does this phenomenon have a name?
- Is there an intuitive explanation for what appears to be a gross predilection to type I errors?
- Should this result be "corrected"? If so, how? (Without collecting more data, of course.)
- Is there a way to identify this phenomenon in published tables, if an accompanying summary table of descriptive statistics is not presented? Are there any red flags in the regression results below?
Stata code to replicate this result:
// Create data (101 obs)
clear
input y x n
0 1 1
0 0 10
1 0 90
end
expand n
// Describe data
tab y x
// OLS regression
reg y x
/*
// A variety of alternative estimations, with SE listed
reg y x, vce(ols) // 0.3
reg y x, vce(robust) // 0.03
reg y x, vce(cluster x) // ~0
reg y x, vce(bootstrap) // 0.03
reg y x, vce(jackknife) // 0.03
reg y x, vce(hc2) // 0.03
reg y x, vce(hc3) // 1.1
*/
exit
Results:
. // Describe data
. tab y x
| x
y | 0 1 | Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
0 | 10 1 | 11
1 | 90 0 | 90
-----------+----------------------+----------
Total | 100 1 | 101
. // OLS regression
. reg y x
Source | SS df MS Number of obs = 101
-------------+---------------------------------- F(1, 99) = 8.82
Model | .801980198 1 .801980198 Prob > F = 0.0037
Residual | 9 99 .090909091 R-squared = 0.0818
-------------+---------------------------------- Adj R-squared = 0.0725
Total | 9.8019802 100 .098019802 Root MSE = .30151
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
y | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
x | -.9 .3030152 -2.97 0.004 -1.501248 -.2987522
_cons | .9 .0301511 29.85 0.000 .8401736 .9598264
------------------------------------------------------------------------------