A misadventure of the correlation coefficient
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Updated: Aug 24, 2025

Author Spotlight: Emerging Technologies and Advanced Tools for Decoding Metabolomics Data Analysis
Published on: November 10, 2023
1UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, London, UK.
Abstract:
The correlation coefficient gauges linear association between two variables. However, interpreting its value depends on the question at hand. This article argues that relying on the correlation coefficient may be irrelevant for many neuroscience research tasks. When the experimental dataset is contextually suitable for binning-averaging, other indicators of statistical association could prove more suitable.
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