CORRELATION AND DEPENDENCE

In statistics, dependence or association is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bi-variate data. In the broadest sense correlation is any statistical association, though in common usage it most often refers to how close two variables are to having a linear relationship with each other. Familiar examples of dependent phenomena include the correlation between the physical statures of parents and their offspring, and the correlation between the demand for a limited supply product and its price.

Correlations are useful because they can indicate a predictive relationship that can be exploited in practice. For example, an electrical utility may produce less power on a mild day based on the correlation between electricity demand and weather. In this example, there is a cause relationship, because extreme weather causes people to use more electricity for heating or cooling. However, in general, the presence of a correlation is not sufficient to infer the presence of a causal relationship.

Formally, random variables are dependent if they do not satisfy a mathematical property of probabilistic independence. In informal parlance, correlation is synonymous with dependence. However, when used in a technical sense, correlation refers to any of several specific types of relationship between mean values. There are several correlation coefficients, often denoted ρ or r, measuring the degree of correlation. The most common of these is the Pearson correlation coefficient , which is sensitive only to a linear relationship between two variables (which may be present even when one variable is a nonlinear function of the other). Other correlation coefficients have been developed to be more robust than the Pearson correlation – that is, more sensitive to nonlinear relationships. Mutual information can also be applied to measure dependence between two variables.

The most familiar measure of dependence between two quantities is the Pearson product-moment correlation cofficient, or “Pearson’s correlation coefficient”, commonly called simply “the correlation coefficient”. It is obtained by dividing the covariance of the two variables by the product of their standard deviations. Karl Pearson developed the coefficient from a similar but slightly different idea by Francis Galton.

The population correlation coefficient ρX,Y between two random variables X and Y with expected values  μX and μY and standard deviations σX and σY is defined as

PX,Y=corr(X,Y) =cov(X,Y)/ σX σY

{\displaystyle \rho _{X,Y}=\mathrm {corr} (X,Y)={\mathrm {cov} (X,Y) \over \sigma _{X}\sigma _{Y}}={E[(X-\mu _{X})(Y-\mu _{Y})] \over \sigma _{X}\sigma _{Y}},}where E is the expected value  operator, cov means covariance, and corr is a widely used alternative notation for the correlation coefficient.

The Pearson correlation is defined only if both of the standard deviations are finite and nonzero. It is a corollary of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality that the correlation cannot exceed 1 in absolute value. The correlation coefficient is symmetric: corr(X,Y) = corr(Y,X).

Rank correlation coefficients

Rank correlation coefficients, such as Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients  and Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient  measure the extent to which, as one variable increases, the other variable tends to increase, without requiring that increase to be represented by a linear relationship. 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. However, this view has little mathematical basis, as rank correlation coefficients measure a different type of relationship than the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, and are best seen as measures of a different type of association, rather than as alternative measure of the population correlation coefficient.

Correlation and causality

The conventional dictum that “correlation does not imply causation” means that correlation cannot be used to infer a causal relationship between the variables. This dictum should not be taken to mean that correlations cannot indicate the potential existence of causal relations. However, the causes underlying the correlation, if any, may be indirect and unknown, and high correlations also overlap with identity relations, where no causal process exists. Consequently, establishing a correlation between two variables is not a sufficient condition to establish a causal relationship (in either direction).

A correlation between age and height in children is fairly causally transparent, but a correlation between mood and health in people is less so. Does improved mood lead to improved health, or does good health lead to good mood, or both? Or does some other factor underlie both? In other words, a correlation can be taken as evidence for a possible causal relationship, but cannot indicate what the causal relationship, if any, might be.

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