Pearson's r

The Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) is a measure of linear correlation between two variables. It's value lies between -1 and +1, -1 indicating total negative linear correlation, 0 indicating no linear correlation and 1 indicating total positive linear correlation. Furthermore, r is invariant under separate changes in location and scale of the two variables, implying that for a linear function the angle to the x-axis does not affect r.

To calculate r for two variables X and Y, one divides the covariance of X and Y by the product of their standard deviations.

Kendall's τ

Similarly to Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, the Kendall rank correlation coefficient (τ) measures ordinal association between two variables. It's value lies between -1 and +1, -1 indicating total negative correlation, 0 indicating no correlation and 1 indicating total positive correlation.

To calculate τ for two variables X and Y, one determines the number of concordant and discordant pairs of observations. τ is given by the number of concordant pairs minus the discordant pairs divided by the total number of pairs.

Cramér's V (φc)

Cramér's V is an association measure for nominal random variables. The coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating independence and 1 indicating perfect association. The empirical estimators used for Cramér's V have been proved to be biased, even for large samples. We use a bias-corrected measure that has been proposed by Bergsma in 2013 that can be found here.

Phik (φk)

Phik (φk) is a new and practical correlation coefficient that works consistently between categorical, ordinal and interval variables, captures non-linear dependency and reverts to the Pearson correlation coefficient in case of a bivariate normal input distribution. There is extensive documentation available here.