One way to quantify the relationship between two variables is to use the Pearson correlation coefficient, which measures the linear association between two variables.
It always takes on a value between -1 and 1 where:
- -1 indicates a perfectly negative linear correlation
- 0 indicates no linear correlation
- 1 indicates a perfectly positive linear correlation
To determine if a correlation coefficient is statistically significant, you can calculate the corresponding t-score and p-value.
The formula to calculate the t-score of a correlation coefficient (r) is:
t = r * √n-2 / √1-r2
The p-value is then calculated as the corresponding two-sided p-value for the t-distribution with n-2 degrees of freedom.
Example: Correlation Test in Python
To determine if the correlation coefficient between two variables is statistically significant, you can perform a correlation test in Python using the pearsonr function from the SciPy library.
This function returns the correlation coefficient between two variables along with the two-tailed p-value.
For example, suppose we have the following two arrays in Python:
#create two arrays
x = [3, 4, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15]
y = [2, 4, 4, 5, 4, 7, 8, 19, 14, 10]
We can import the pearsonr function and calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient between the two arrays:
from scipy.stats.stats import pearsonr #calculation correlation coefficient and p-value between x and y pearsonr(x, y) (0.8076177030748631, 0.004717255828132089)
Here’s how to interpret the output:
- Pearson correlation coefficient (r): 0.8076
- Two-tailed p-value: 0.0047
Since the correlation coefficient is close to 1, this tells us that there is a strong positive association between the two variables.
And since the corresponding p-value is less than .05, we conclude that there is a statistically significant association between the two variables.
Note that we can also extract the individual correlation coefficient and p-value from the pearsonr function as well:
#extract correlation coefficient (rounded to 4 decimal places) r = round(pearsonr(x, y)[0], 4) print(r) 0.8076 #extract p-value (rounded to 4 decimal places) p = round(pearsonr(x, y)[1], 4) print(p) 0.0047
These values are a bit easier to read compared to the output from the original pearsonr function.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials provide additional information about correlation coefficients:
An Introduction to the Pearson Correlation Coefficient
What is Considered to Be a “Strong” Correlation?
The Five Assumptions for Pearson Correlation