Spearman's rho



Spearman's rho is a measure of the linear relationship between two variables. It differs from Pearson's correlation only in that the computations are done after the numbers are converted to ranks. When converting to ranks, the smallest value on X becomes a rank of 1, etc. Consider the following X-Y pairs: 
X      Y
7      4
5      7
8      9
9      8
Converting these to ranks would result in the following: 
X      Y
2      1
1      2
3      4
4      3
The first value of X (which was a 7) is converted into a 2 because 7 is the second lowest value of X. The X value of 5 is converted into a 1 since it is the lowest. Spearman's rho can be computed with the formula for Pearson's r using the ranked data. For this example, Spearman's rho = 0.60 Spearman's rho is an example of a "rank-randomization" test.