When is a correlation between non‐independent variables “spurious”?

By Michael T. Brett. 2004

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e065089f90085b4c71ea2021572f4bdd6a6363ec

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. D. Zelený
2. J. Diniz-Filho
3. P. Armsworth

In Statistics and Probability

1. D. Zelený
2. J. Diniz-Filho
3. P. Cassey
4. B. Hawkins
5. T. Blackburn

Citations in the corpus

• Management costs for small protected areas and economies of scale in habitat conservation (2011, background): “, 2007), an approach (relating compound variable Y/X to variable X) prone to detecting spurious negative correlations (Brett, 2004).”
• Self-correlation between assimilation and respiration resulting from flux partitioning of eddy-covariance CO2 fluxes. (2009, background): “Self-correlation (Hicks, 1978; Klipp and Mahrt, 2004; Baas et al., 2006) has also been referred to as spurious correlation (Pearson, 1897; Kenney, 1982; Jackson and Somers, 1991; Brett, 2004) and as the shared variable problem in the statistics literature.”
• The more you introduce the more you get: the role of colonization pressure and propagule pressure in invasion ecology (2009, background): “Plotting x + y vs. y will produce a spurious positive correlation (Brett, 2004).”
• The allometry of reproduction within plant populations (2009, unknown): “As total biomass includes reproductive biomass, it has been argued that this can result in a ‘spurious correlation’ (Brett 2004).”
• Food quantity and quality regulation of trophic transfer between primary producers and a keystone grazer (Daphnia) in pelagic freshwater food webs (2007, background): “We acknowledge that spurious correlation ( Brett 2004 ) could distort the R2 value for”
• Water links the historical and contemporary components of the Australian bird diversity gradient (2005, background): “In addition, there must be an intrinsic correlation between the two variables, as richness is the denominator of MRD (Brett, 2004).”
• Which results of the standard test for community‐weighted mean approach are too optimistic? (2018, methodology): “…can be tested using a column- based permutation test (modified permutation test sensu Zelený & Schaffers, 2012), if we consider such a relationship as an example of spurious correlation (Brett, 2004); more about this below (“Spurious correlation” of the CWM with intrinsic sample attributes).”