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How Correlated Are You?

allendowney.com

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Re: How Correlated Are You?

#21

Post by syntaxfree »

An interesting exercise would have been to run a Gaussian Graphical Model (like the “graphical lasso”) to sparsify that correlation matrix.

In the Gaussian case, those methods are able to identify nonzero partial correlations and hence a causal graph. Since there’s multimodality here trust in that interpretation should be lower, but it’s still worthwhile looking at a pseudo/candidate causal structure as part of EDA.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#23

Post by indeed30 »

tgv wrote: post #4

Surprising article. The conclusion that ear protrusion (yes, that's a thing) has no genetic basis is of course not impossible, but seems unlikely. It would require another data set to establish it.

Couldn't it be possible for ear protrusion to be uncorrelated with the other variables but still have a genetic basis - presumably by depending on a set of genes with little overlap over the ones that govern size?

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#26

Post by badcppdev »

"6,000 adult US military personnel (4,082 men and 1,986 women)." .... "Despite the presence of reservists in the sample, it is still not an approximation of the US Civilian population"

This dataset is from the US military so please remember that when you think about generalising these results to the rest of the world.

Since everyone is talking about it Ear Protrusion 'might' be strongly correlated to height IF you don't exclude short people from the sample set.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#28

Post by DataDaoDe »

mo_42 wrote: post #10
cassianoleal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people not try to work out the ethymology of words? Everything makes more sense when you know where words came from and how they came to be. :)

I do somehow because of my inherent interest in understanding the world. However, this got me intro communication issues with my former boss. Apparently, this person was not interested in what words (or combinations of words) actually mean but rather simply just how they're used frequently. Every new combination of words was utterly confusing to this person. As a conclusion, I try to figure out how people process lan…

In linguistics, there is a saying coined by Firth, “You will know a word by the company it keeps.” The idea is that a words meaning is embedded in all the contexts in which it occurs. This is how virtually everyone processes the semantics of words. Meaning and contexts vary with time and person and can lead to many misunderstandings.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#29

Post by SamPatt »

amelius wrote: post #25

No mention of the one size every man is interested in most.

I've read height is weakly correlated (which intuitively makes sense, as greater height is more or less synonymous with larger body size).

Also the second-to-fourth digit ratio seems correlated. Longer ring finger seems to indicate more testosterone in utero.

The (many) other claims appear to be bunk.

Re: How Correlated Are You?

#30

Post by legobmw99 »

badcppdev wrote: post #26

"6,000 adult US military personnel (4,082 men and 1,986 women)." .... "Despite the presence of reservists in the sample, it is still not an approximation of the US Civilian population" This dataset is from the US military so please remember that when you think about generalising these results to the rest of the world. Since everyone is talking about it Ear Protrusion 'might' be strongly correlated to height IF you do…

In particular, the statement that weight is the most correlated of any measurement with all the others seems like it would almost certainly not be true of a general population with a broader spectrum of physical fitness
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