To calculate a confidence interval, r must be transformed to give a Normal distribution making use of Fisher's z transformation : This additional information can be obtained from a confidence interval for the population correlation coefficient. ​ (Fig.5 5).Ĭonfidence interval for the population correlation coefficientĪlthough the hypothesis test indicates whether there is a linear relationship, it gives no indication of the strength of that relationship. ​ (Fig.4) 4) however, there could be a nonlinear relationship between the variables (Fig. A value close to 0 indicates no linear relationship (Fig. one variable decreases as the other increases Fig.

A value close to -1 indicates a strong negative linear relationship (i.e. one variable increases with the other Fig.

A value of the correlation coefficient close to +1 indicates a strong positive linear relationship (i.e. The value of r always lies between -1 and +1. This is the product moment correlation coefficient (or Pearson correlation coefficient). Where is the mean of the x values, and is the mean of the y values. ), then the correlation coefficient is given by the following equation: In algebraic notation, if we have two variables x and y, and the data take the form of n pairs (i.e. To quantify the strength of the relationship, we can calculate the correlation coefficient.

On a scatter diagram, the closer the points lie to a straight line, the stronger the linear relationship between two variables.