Correlation Coefficient

Correlation coefficient

It's been a while since we looked at anything from the domain of statistics so here's another little bite-sized piece - a function to compute Pearson's "product moment correlation coefficient".

It's a measure of dependence between two data sets. We'll express it in terms of unbiased standard deviation which I didn't write out before so I'll include that function too.

let unbiased_standard_deviation t =
  (*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbiased_estimation_of_standard_deviation

    In statistics and in particular statistical theory, unbiased
    estimation of a standard deviation is the calculation from a
    statistical sample of an estimated value of the standard deviation
    (a measure of statistical dispersion) of a population of values,
    in such a way that the expected value of the calculation equals
    the true value.

  *)
 let av = arithmetic_mean t in
 let squared_diffs =
   List.fold_left (fun acc xi -> ((xi -. av) *. (xi -. av)) :: acc) [] t
 in sqrt ((sum squared_diffs)/.((float_of_int (List.length t)) -. 1.0))

let correlation_coefficient x y =
  (*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_and_dependence

    The most familiar measure of dependence between two quantities is
    the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, or "Pearson's
    correlation coefficient", commonly called simply "the correlation
    coefficient". It is obtained by dividing the covariance of the two
    variables by the product of their standard deviations.  
  *) 

  let x_b = arithmetic_mean x in
  let y_b = arithmetic_mean y in
  let s_x = unbiased_standard_deviation x in
  let s_y = unbiased_standard_deviation y in

  if s_x = 0. || s_y = 0. then 0.
  else
    let f acc x_i y_i =
      acc +. ((x_i -. x_b) *. (y_i -. y_b)) in
    let n = float_of_int (List.length x) in
    let s = List.fold_left2 f 0.0 x y  in
    s/.((n -. 1.) *. s_x *. s_y)