Unconditional versions of several tests commonly used in the analysis of contingency tables

By focusing an a confidence interval fora nuisance parameter, Berger and Bo os(1994, Journal of the American Statistical Association 89, 1012-1016) pro posed new unconditional tests. In particular, they showed that, for a 2 x 2 table, this procedure generally was more powerful than Fisher's exact test . This paper utilizes and extends their approach to obtain unconditional te sts for combining several 2 x 2 tables and testing for trend and homogeneit y in a 2 x K table. The unconditional procedures are compared to the condit ional ones by reanalyzing some published biomedical data.