ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Cochran–Mantel–Haenszel statistics

Okay, I'll try my best to explain it in a way that a 5-year-old can understand!

You know how sometimes we want to see if two things are related to each other? Like maybe we want to know if eating vegetables helps us grow taller. We could look at a group of people who eat a lot of vegetables and a group of people who don't eat many vegetables and see if the tall people are more likely to be in the vegetable group.

But sometimes it's not that simple. What if we have three different groups - some people who eat a lot of vegetables and are also tall, some people who eat a lot of vegetables and are short, and some people who don't eat many vegetables and are short?

That's where the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel statistics come in! They help us compare three different groups and see if there's a relationship between them. They do this by looking at how many times a certain thing (like being tall) happens in each group, and then figuring out if there's a big difference between the groups or not.

It's kind of like counting all the kids in your class who have brown hair, and then seeing if there's a bigger percentage of brown-haired kids in one grade than in another grade. The Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel statistics help us do that, but with more complicated data.

So basically, the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel statistics help us see if there's a connection between three different groups of things, and they do it by counting and comparing data. Pretty cool, huh?