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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 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 .
If the relationship between values of and values of ¯ is linear (which is certainly true when there are only two possibilities for x) this will give the same result as the square of Pearson's correlation coefficient; otherwise the correlation ratio will be larger in magnitude. It can therefore be used for judging non-linear relationships.
The information given by a correlation coefficient is not enough to define the dependence structure between random variables. The correlation coefficient completely defines the dependence structure only in very particular cases, for example when the distribution is a multivariate normal distribution. (See diagram above.)
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.
In statistics, an effect size is a value measuring the strength of the relationship between two variables in a population, or a sample-based estimate of that quantity. It can refer to the value of a statistic calculated from a sample of data, the value of one parameter for a hypothetical population, or to the equation that operationalizes how statistics or parameters lead to the effect size ...
Third, a zero Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient does not necessarily mean independence, because only the two first moments are considered. For example, = (y ≠ 0) will lead to Pearson correlation coefficient of zero, which is arguably misleading. [2]
Pearson correlation coefficient. Three important notes should be highlighted with regard to correlation: The presence of outliers can severely bias the correlation coefficient. Large sample sizes can result in statistically significant correlations that may have little or no practical significance.