In statistics, correlation defines the similarity between two random variables. The most commonly used correlation is the Pearson correlation and it is defined by the following:
The preceding formula defines the Pearson correlation as the covariance between X and Y, which is divided by the standard deviation of X and Y, or it can also be defined as the expected mean of the sum of multiplied difference of random variables with respect to the mean divided by the standard deviation of X and Y. Let's understand this with an example. Let's take the mileage and horsepower of various cars and see if there is a relation between the two. This can be achieved using the pearsonr
function in the SciPy package:
>>> mpg = [21.0, 21.0, 22.8, 21.4, 18.7, 18.1, 14.3, 24.4, 22.8, 19.2, 17.8, 16.4, 17.3, 15.2, 10.4, 10.4, 14.7, 32.4, 30.4, 33.9, 21.5, 15.5, 15.2, 13.3, 19.2, 27.3, 26.0, 30.4, 15.8, 19.7, 15.0, 21.4] >>> hp = [110, 110, 93, 110, 175, 105, 245, 62, 95, 123...