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Statistics LibreTexts

18.4: Randomization Association

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skills to develop

  • Compute a randomization test for Pearson's r

A significance test for Pearson's r is described in the section inferential statistics for b and r. The significance test described in that section assumes normality. This section describes a method for testing the significance of r that makes no distributional assumptions.

Table 18.4.1: Example data
X 1.0 2.4 3.8 4.0 11.0
Y 1.0 2.0 2.3 3.7 2.5

The approach is to consider the X variable fixed and compare the correlation obtained in the actual data to the correlations that could be obtained by rearranging the Y variable. For the data shown in Table 18.4.1, the correlation between X and Y is 0.385. There is only one arrangement of Y that would produce a higher correlation. This arrangement is shown in Table 18.4.2 and the r is 0.945. Therefore, there are two arrangements of Y that lead to correlations as high or higher than the actual data.

Table 18.4.1: The example data arranged to give the highest r
X Y
1.0 1.0
2.4 2.0
3.8 2.3
4.0 2.5
11.0 3.7

The next step is to calculate the number of possible arrangements of Y. The number is simply N!, where N is the number of pairs of scores. Here, the number of arrangements is 5!=120. Therefore, the probability value is 2/120=0.017. Note that this is a one-tailed probability since it is the proportion of arrangements that give an r as large or larger. For the two-tailed probability, you would also count arrangements for which the value of r were less than or equal to 0.385. In randomization tests, the two-tailed probability is not necessarily double the one-tailed probability.


This page titled 18.4: Randomization Association is shared under a Public Domain license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by David Lane via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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