Pearson Correlation Testing in R Programming

23 Dec, 2021
Correlation is a statistical measure that indicates how strongly two variables are related. It involves the relationship between multiple variables as well. For instance, if one is interested to know whether there is a relationship between the heights of fathers and sons, a correlation coefficient can be calculated to answer this question. Generally, it lies between -1 and +1. It is a scaled version of covariance and provides the direction and strength of a relationship. 
There are mainly two types of correlation: 
Parametric Correlation – Pearson correlation(r): It measures a linear dependence between two variables (x and y) is known as a parametric correlation test because it depends on the distribution of the data.
Non-Parametric Correlation – Kendall(tau) and Spearman(rho): They are rank-based correlation coefficients, are known as non-parametric correlation.
Pearson Rank Correlation is a parametric correlation. The Pearson correlation coefficient is probably the most widely used measure for linear relationships between two normal distributed variables and thus often just called “correlation coefficient”. The formula for calculating the Pearson Rank Correlation is as follows:
where, 
r: pearson correlation coefficient
x and y: two vectors of length n
mx and my: corresponds to the means of x and y, respectively.
Note:
r takes a value between -1 (negative correlation) and 1 (positive correlation).
r = 0 means no correlation.
Can not be applied to ordinal variables.
The sample size should be moderate (20-30) for good estimation.
Outliers can lead to misleading values means not robust with outliers.
R Language provides two methods to calculate the pearson correlation coefficient. By using the functions cor() or cor.test() it can be calculated. It can be noted that cor() computes the correlation coefficient whereas cor.test() computes the test for association or correlation between paired samples. It returns both the correlation coefficient and the significance level(or p-value) of the correlation.
Syntax: cor(x, y, method = “pearson”) cor.test(x, y, method = “pearson”)
Parameters: 
x, y: numeric vectors with the same length
method: correlation method
R
# R program to illustrate# pearson Correlation Testing# Using cor() # Taking two numeric# Vectors with same lengthx = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)y = c(1, 3, 6, 2, 7, 4, 5) # Calculating# Correlation coefficient# Using cor() methodresult = cor(x, y, method = "pearson") # Print the resultcat("Pearson correlation coefficient is:", result)
Output: 
Pearson correlation coefficient is: 0.5357143
R
# R program to illustrate# pearson Correlation Testing# Using cor.test() # Taking two numeric# Vectors with same lengthx = c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)y = c(1, 3, 6, 2, 7, 4, 5) # Calculating# Correlation coefficient# Using cor.test() methodresult = cor.test(x, y, method = "pearson") # Print the resultprint(result)
Output: 
Pearson's product-moment correlation

data:  x and y
t = 1.4186, df = 5, p-value = 0.2152
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
 -0.3643187  0.9183058
sample estimates:
      cor 
0.5357143 
In the output above:
T is the value of the test statistic (T = 1.4186)
p-value is the significance level of the test statistic (p-value = 0.2152).
alternative hypothesis is a character string describing the alternative hypothesis (true correlation is not equal to 0).
sample estimates is the correlation coefficient. For Pearson correlation coefficient it’s named as cor (Cor.coeff = 0.5357).
Example 3:
Data: Download the CSV file here.
R
# R program to illustrate# Pearson Correlation Testing # Import data into RStudiodf = read.csv("Auto.csv") # Taking two column# Vectors with same lengthx = df$mpgy = df$weight # Calculating# Correlation coefficient# Using cor() methodresult = cor(x, y, method = "pearson") # Print the resultcat("Person correlation coefficient is:", result) # Using cor.test() methodres = cor.test(x, y, method = "pearson")print(res)
Output: 
Person correlation coefficient is: -0.8782815
    Pearson's product-moment correlation

data:  x and y
t = -31.709, df = 298, p-value < 2.2e-16
alternative hypothesis: true correlation is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
 -0.9018288 -0.8495329
sample estimates:
       cor 
-0.8782815 
kumar_satyam
data-science
Machine Learning
R Language
Machine Learning
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