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The correlation coefficient is +1 in the case of a perfect direct (increasing) linear relationship (correlation), −1 in the case of a perfect inverse (decreasing) linear relationship (anti-correlation), [5] and some value in the open interval (,) in all other cases, indicating the degree of linear dependence between the variables. As it ...
A correlation coefficient is a numerical measure of some type of linear correlation, meaning a statistical relationship between two variables. [ a ] The variables may be two columns of a given data set of observations, often called a sample , or two components of a multivariate random variable with a known distribution .
Pearson's correlation coefficient is the covariance of the two variables divided by the product of their standard deviations. The form of the definition involves a "product moment", that is, the mean (the first moment about the origin) of the product of the mean-adjusted random variables; hence the modifier product-moment in the name.
Correlation is a valuable type of scientific evidence in fields such as medicine, psychology, and sociology. Correlations must first be confirmed as real, and every possible causative relationship must then be systematically explored.
A bivariate correlation is a measure of whether and how two variables covary linearly, that is, whether the variance of one changes in a linear fashion as the variance of the other changes. Covariance can be difficult to interpret across studies because it depends on the scale or level of measurement used.
In statistics, path analysis is used to describe the directed dependencies among a set of variables. This includes models equivalent to any form of multiple regression analysis, factor analysis, canonical correlation analysis, discriminant analysis, as well as more general families of models in the multivariate analysis of variance and covariance analyses (MANOVA, ANOVA, ANCOVA).
With any number of random variables in excess of 1, the variables can be stacked into a random vector whose i th element is the i th random variable. Then the variances and covariances can be placed in a covariance matrix, in which the (i, j) element is the covariance between the i th random variable and the j th one.
Formally, the partial correlation between X and Y given a set of n controlling variables Z = {Z 1, Z 2, ..., Z n}, written ρ XY·Z, is the correlation between the residuals e X and e Y resulting from the linear regression of X with Z and of Y with Z, respectively.