Skip to main content
1 of 8
Poik
  • 570
  • 1
  • 6
  • 10

How does the Goodman-Kruskal Gamma test and the Kendall-Tau or Spearman-Rho test compare?

In my work, we are comparing predicted rankings versus true rankings for some sets of data. Up until recently, we've been using Kendall-Tau alone. A group working on a similar project suggested we try to use the Goodman-Kruskal Gamma test instead, and that they preferred it. I was wondering what the differences between the different rank correlation algorithms were.

The best I've found was this answer, which claims Spearman is used in place of usual linear correlations, and that Kendall-Tau is less direct and more closely resembles Goodman-Kruskal Gamma. The data I'm working with doesn't seem to have any obvious linear correlations, and the data is heavily skewed and non-normal.

Also, Spearman generally reports better correlation than Kendall-Tau for our data, and I was wondering what that says about the data specifically. I'm not a statistician, so some of the papers I'm reading on these things just seem like jargon to me, sorry.

Poik
  • 570
  • 1
  • 6
  • 10