Correlare

Correlare is a verb used in Italian and other Romance languages, including Romanian, meaning to establish or study a correlation between two or more variables. In statistics and data analysis, correlare refers to assessing how closely two variables move together.

A correlation is a statistic that measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between variables. The most common measure is the Pearson correlation coefficient r, which ranges from -1 to 1. Values near 1 indicate strong positive linear association, values near -1 indicate strong negative linear association, and values near 0 suggest little to no linear relationship. Nonparametric alternatives such as Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau assess monotonic relationships and are less sensitive to outliers or nonlinearity.

Interpretation and caveats: a correlation indicates association, not causation. Spurious correlations can arise from confounding factors, selection bias, or data dredging. The presence of outliers, a nonlinear relationship, or restricted data ranges can distort the coefficient. For Pearson correlation, assumptions include linearity and roughly normal distributions, and the magnitude of r depends on the data scale.

Applications: correlations are used across sciences, economics, and engineering to describe relationships, build predictive models, and construct correlation matrices or network graphs. Techniques such as partial correlation measure the association between two variables while controlling for others. Visualization with scatterplots is often essential for proper interpretation.