Climb the mountains

Introduction of Spearman’s rank correlation

In statistics, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient or Spearman's rho, named after Charles Spearman and often denoted by the Greek letter rs (rho) or as p , is a nonparametric measure of rank correlation (statistical dependence between the ranking of two variables). It assesses how well the relationship between two variables can be described using a monotonic function.
The Spearman correlation between two variables is equal to the Pearson correlation between the rank values of those two variables; while Pearson's correlation assesses linear relationships, Spearman's correlation assesses monotonic relationships (whether linear or not). If there are no repeated data values, a perfect Spearman correlation of +1 or −1 occurs when each of the variables is a perfect monotone function of the other.
Intuitively, the Spearman correlation between two variables will be high when observations have a similar (or identical for a correlation of 1) rank (i.e. relative position label of the observations within the variable: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.) between the two variables, and low when observations have a dissimilar (or fully opposed for a correlation of -1) rank between the two variables.

Spearman's coefficient is appropriate for both continuous and discrete variable including ordinal variables. Both Spearman's ({\displaystyle \rho }p) and Kendal’s   (t) can be formulated as special cases of a more general correlation coefficient.