A Practical, Powerful, Robust and Interpretable Family of Correlation Coefficients

If we conducted a competition for which statistical quantity would be the most valuable in exploratory data analysis, the winner would most likely be the correlation coefficient with a significant difference from its first competitor. In addition, most data applications contain non-normal data with outliers without being able to be converted to normal data. Therefore, we search for robust correlation coefficients to nonnormality and outliers that could be applied to all applications and detect influenced or hidden correlations not recognized by the most popular correlation coefficients. We introduce a correlation-coefficient family with the Pearson and Spearman coefficients as specific cases. Other family members provide desirable lower p-values than those derived by the standard coefficients in the earlier problems. The proposed family of coefficients, their cut-off points, and p-values, computed by permutation tests, could be applied by all scientists analyzing data. We share simulations, code, and real data by email or the internet