Why Use Yates Correction?

The effect of Yates' correction is to prevent overestimation of statistical significance for small data. This formula is chiefly used when at least one cell of the table has an expected count smaller than 5.

Is Yates correction necessary?

Although some people recommend that you should use the correction only if your expected cell frequency is below 10 or even 5, others recommend that you don't use it at all. A large body of research has found that the correction is too strict.

What is true about Yates correction?

To reduce the error in approximation, Frank Yates, an English statistician, suggested a correction for continuity that adjusts the formula for Pearson's chi-squared test by subtracting 0.5 from the difference between each observed value and its expected value in a 2 × 2 contingency table.