Kendall rank correlation coefficient

In statistics, the Kendall rank correlation coefficient, commonly referred to as Kendall's τ coefficient (after the Greek letter τ, tau), is a statistic used to measure the ordinal association between two measured quantities. A τ test is a non-parametric hypothesis test for statistical dependence based on the τ coefficient. It is a measure of rank correlation: the similarity of the orderings of the data when ranked by each of the quantities. It is named after Maurice Kendall, who developed it in 1938, though Gustav Fechner had proposed a similar measure in the context of time series in 1897. Intuitively, the Kendall correlation between two variables will be high when observations have a similar (or identical for a correlation of 1) rank (i.e. relative position label of the observations within the variable: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) between the two variables, and low when observations have a dissimilar (or fully different for a correlation of −1) rank between the two variables. Both Kendall's and Spearman's can be formulated as special cases of a more general correlation coefficient. Its notions of concordance and discordance also appear in other areas of statistics, like the Rand index in cluster analysis. Let be a set of observations of the joint random variables X and Y, such that all the values of () and () are unique (ties are neglected for simplicity). Any pair of observations and , where , are said to be concordant if the sort order of and agrees: that is, if either both and holds or both and ; otherwise they are said to be discordant. The Kendall τ coefficient is defined as: where is the binomial coefficient for the number of ways to choose two items from n items. The denominator is the total number of pair combinations, so the coefficient must be in the range −1 ≤ τ ≤ 1. If the agreement between the two rankings is perfect (i.e., the two rankings are the same) the coefficient has value 1. If the disagreement between the two rankings is perfect (i.e., one ranking is the reverse of the other) the coefficient has value −1.

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Related concepts (7)

Spearman's rank correlation coefficient

In statistics, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient or Spearman's ρ, named after Charles Spearman and often denoted by the Greek letter (rho) or as , is a nonparametric measure of rank correlation (statistical dependence between the rankings of two variables). It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function. The Spearman correlation between two variables is equal to the Pearson correlation between the rank values of those two variables; while Pearson's correlation assesses linear relationships, Spearman's correlation assesses monotonic relationships (whether linear or not).

Rank correlation

In statistics, a rank correlation is any of several statistics that measure an ordinal association—the relationship between rankings of different ordinal variables or different rankings of the same variable, where a "ranking" is the assignment of the ordering labels "first", "second", "third", etc. to different observations of a particular variable. A rank correlation coefficient measures the degree of similarity between two rankings, and can be used to assess the significance of the relation between them.

Ordinal data

Ordinal data is a categorical, statistical data type where the variables have natural, ordered categories and the distances between the categories are not known. These data exist on an ordinal scale, one of four levels of measurement described by S. S. Stevens in 1946. The ordinal scale is distinguished from the nominal scale by having a ranking. It also differs from the interval scale and ratio scale by not having category widths that represent equal increments of the underlying attribute.

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