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The sign of the covariance, therefore, shows the tendency in the linear relationship between the variables. If greater values of one variable mainly correspond with greater values of the other variable, and the same holds for lesser values (that is, the variables tend to show similar behavior), the covariance is positive. [2]
In probability theory and statistics, the covariance function describes how much two random variables change together (their covariance) with varying spatial or temporal separation. For a random field or stochastic process Z ( x ) on a domain D , a covariance function C ( x , y ) gives the covariance of the values of the random field at the two ...
Throughout this article, boldfaced unsubscripted and are used to refer to random vectors, and Roman subscripted and are used to refer to scalar random variables.. If the entries in the column vector = (,, …,) are random variables, each with finite variance and expected value, then the covariance matrix is the matrix whose (,) entry is the covariance [1]: 177 ...
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.
A third concept related to covariance and contravariance is invariance. A scalar (also called type-0 or rank-0 tensor) is an object that does not vary with the change in basis. An example of a physical observable that is a scalar is the mass of a particle.
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.
In practice, one must be careful to ensure that the resulting covariance matrix (an n × n matrix) is always positive-definite. One strategy is to define a correlation matrix A which is then multiplied by a scalar to give a covariance matrix: this must be positive-definite.