Pearson correlation coefficient

Measure of linear correlation / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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In statistics, the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC)[lower-alpha 1] is a correlation coefficient that measures linear correlation between two sets of data. It is the ratio between the covariance of two variables and the product of their standard deviations; thus, it is essentially a normalized measurement of the covariance, such that the result always has a value between −1 and 1. As with covariance itself, the measure can only reflect a linear correlation of variables, and ignores many other types of relationships or correlations. As a simple example, one would expect the age and height of a sample of teenagers from a high school to have a Pearson correlation coefficient significantly greater than 0, but less than 1 (as 1 would represent an unrealistically perfect correlation).

Correlation_coefficient.png
Examples of scatter diagrams with different values of correlation coefficient (ρ)
Correlation_examples2.svg
Several sets of (x, y) points, with the correlation coefficient of x and y for each set. The correlation reflects the strength and direction of a linear relationship (top row), but not the slope of that relationship (middle), nor many aspects of nonlinear relationships (bottom). N.B.: the figure in the center has a slope of 0 but in that case the correlation coefficient is undefined because the variance of Y is zero.

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