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The correlation matrix is symmetric because the correlation between and is the same as the correlation between and . A correlation matrix appears, for example, in one formula for the coefficient of multiple determination , a measure of goodness of fit in multiple regression .
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.
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.
An entity closely related to the covariance matrix is the matrix of Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients between each of the random variables in the random vector , which can be written as = ( ()) ( ()), where is the matrix of the diagonal elements of (i.e., a diagonal matrix of the variances of for =, …,).
The sample covariance matrix (SCM) is an unbiased and efficient estimator of the covariance matrix if the space of covariance matrices is viewed as an extrinsic convex cone in R p×p; however, measured using the intrinsic geometry of positive-definite matrices, the SCM is a biased and inefficient estimator. [1]
The reason the sample covariance matrix has in the denominator rather than is essentially that the population mean is not known and is replaced by the sample mean ¯. If the population mean E ( X ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {E} (\mathbf {X} )} is known, the analogous unbiased estimate is given by
The sample covariance matrix has in the denominator rather than due to a variant of Bessel's correction: In short, the sample covariance relies on the difference between each observation and the sample mean, but the sample mean is slightly correlated with each observation since it is defined in terms of all observations.
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. [citation needed]