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If, as the one variable increases, the other decreases, the rank correlation coefficients will be negative. It is common to regard these rank correlation coefficients as alternatives to Pearson's coefficient, used either to reduce the amount of calculation or to make the coefficient less sensitive to non-normality in distributions.
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.
A negative correlation between variables is also called inverse correlation. Negative correlation can be seen geometrically when two normalized random vectors are viewed as points on a sphere, and the correlation between them is the cosine of the circular arc of separation of the points on a great circle of the sphere. [ 1 ]
The correlation coefficient can also be used when the data are binary. Pearson's r can vary in magnitude from −1 to 1, with −1 indicating a perfect negative linear relation, 1 indicating a perfect positive linear relation, and 0 indicating no linear relation between two variables.
Notably, correlation is dimensionless while covariance is in units obtained by multiplying the units of the two variables. If Y always takes on the same values as X , we have the covariance of a variable with itself (i.e. σ X X {\displaystyle \sigma _{XX}} ), which is called the variance and is more commonly denoted as σ X 2 , {\displaystyle ...
The value –1 conveys a perfect negative correlation controlling for some variables (that is, an exact linear relationship in which higher values of one variable are associated with lower values of the other); the value 1 conveys a perfect positive linear relationship, and the value 0 conveys that there is no linear relationship.
The classical measure of dependence, the Pearson correlation coefficient, [1] is mainly sensitive to a linear relationship between two variables. Distance correlation was introduced in 2005 by Gábor J. Székely in several lectures to address this deficiency of Pearson's correlation, namely that it can easily be zero for dependent variables.