I'm trying to examine the relationship between two samples of ordinal scale values, by computing Kendall's Tau and its corresponding confidence interval (CI) and p-value.
I used the R function cor.test (base package) to calculate the p-value:
> cor.test(x, y, alternative = "two.sided", method = "kendall")
which returns:
data: x and y
z = -1.8504, p-value = 0.06425
alternative hypothesis: true tau is not equal to 0
sample estimates:
tau
-0.02553355
and I used the R function kendall.ci (NSM3 package) to calculate the CI:
> kendall.ci(x, y, alpha=0.05, type="t")
which returns:
1 - alpha = 0.95 two-sided CI for tau:
-0.042, -0.009
The problem: I'm having trouble interpreting and reporting these results, as I'd expect a 95% CI that does not include zero (the null-hypothesis value) to correspond to a p-value lower than 0.05, or conversely, a p-value above 0.05 with a 95% CI that includes zero.
Re the data: x and y both have 4,081 integer elements, no NaN's and 6 and 10 unique values, respectively (i.e. many "recurring values" or "ties"). I suspect the issue may be related to how these functions handle ties, but have yet to find the answer in the docs.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!