Timeline for Does high correlation coefficient mean anything?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 22, 2014 at 3:05 | vote | accept | Graviton | ||
| Apr 14, 2014 at 9:30 | comment | added | Peter Flom | We can't say there must be a relationship in a population from any thing we find from a sample. All we can do is estimate how strong it is and estimate how good our guess is. It could be chance. You could toss a fair coin and get 10 heads in a row. | |
| Apr 14, 2014 at 5:56 | comment | added | Graviton | Peter, you are saying that random noise can produce very strong correlations, so that means that it is wrong to infer that there must be some relationship between two variables, even though they are highly correlated? | |
| Apr 11, 2014 at 13:37 | comment | added | Nick Cox | The popularity of expressions like "correlation does not mean causation" may lie in affection for alliteration and assonance. Why pick on correlation? It's no worse than many other methods. There are shelves full of books on causation, so the question can't be decided briefly, but I'd venture riskily that causation is mostly outside statistics. Nevertheless statistics can throw some light on causation, if only by underlining which relationships are broadly consistent with a causal idea, and which not so. That does usually work better with a model, which correlation doesn't provide. | |
| Apr 11, 2014 at 10:03 | history | answered | Peter Flom | CC BY-SA 3.0 |