Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 iii Paper 221 1 iii Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-25
Cross-classify the binary exposure against the binary outcome . The four cells count placebo survivors or deaths and active-treatment survivors or deaths.
Under the sharp causal null hypothesis, every observed outcome equals the fixed value , regardless of assignment. With fixed arm sizes, the active set is a uniformly chosen subset of size . Under independent assignment, are independent Bernoulli variables with probability , and conditioning on their total again makes the active set uniform. Conditional on the table margins, the active-group outcome count therefore has exactly the hypergeometric distribution used by Fisher's exact test.
The conditional p-value is super-uniform for every set of margins. The law of total probability then givesHence the test is valid under either assignment mechanism.