A Statistical Method for Evaluating the Reproducibility of Age Determination

Abstract

The coefficients of variation and the index of precision provide a statistical test of reproducibility of aging between readers. Because the coefficients of variation and the index of precision incorporate the averaged year-class of a fish species, they are free from the shortcoming of the percent agreement method. Because variance is a better estimator than absolute difference, the coefficient of variation is a stronger estimator than the index of average percent error in providing a test statistic.Key words: age determination, coefficients of variation, index of precision, average percent error, percent agreement