Calculating Pearson correlation and significance in Python

Question

You can have a look at scipy.stats:

from pydoc import help
from scipy.stats.stats import pearsonr
help(pearsonr)

>>>
Help on function pearsonr in module scipy.stats.stats:

pearsonr(x, y)
 Calculates a Pearson correlation coefficient and the p-value for testing
 non-correlation.

 The Pearson correlation coefficient measures the linear relationship
 between two datasets. Strictly speaking, Pearson's correlation requires
 that each dataset be normally distributed. Like other correlation
 coefficients, this one varies between -1 and +1 with 0 implying no
 correlation. Correlations of -1 or +1 imply an exact linear
 relationship. Positive correlations imply that as x increases, so does
 y. Negative correlations imply that as x increases, y decreases.

 The p-value roughly indicates the probability of an uncorrelated system
 producing datasets that have a Pearson correlation at least as extreme
 as the one computed from these datasets. The p-values are not entirely
 reliable but are probably reasonable for datasets larger than 500 or so.

 Parameters
 ----------
 x : 1D array
 y : 1D array the same length as x

 Returns
 -------
 (Pearson's correlation coefficient,
  2-tailed p-value)

 References
 ----------
 http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/glosp.html#Pearson%20Correlation

The Pearson correlation can be calculated with numpy's corrcoef.

import numpy
numpy.corrcoef(list1, list2)[0, 1]

An alternative can be a native scipy function from linregress which calculates:

slope : slope of the regression line

intercept : intercept of the regression line

r-value : correlation coefficient

p-value : two-sided p-value for a hypothesis test whose null hypothesis is that the slope is zero

stderr : Standard error of the estimate

And here is an example:

a = [15, 12, 8, 8, 7, 7, 7, 6, 5, 3]
b = [10, 25, 17, 11, 13, 17, 20, 13, 9, 15]
from scipy.stats import linregress
linregress(a, b)

will return you:

LinregressResult(slope=0.20833333333333337, intercept=13.375, rvalue=0.14499815458068521, pvalue=0.68940144811669501, stderr=0.50261704627083648)

If you don't feel like installing scipy, I've used this quick hack, slightly modified from Programming Collective Intelligence:

def pearsonr(x, y):
  # Assume len(x) == len(y)
  n = len(x)
  sum_x = float(sum(x))
  sum_y = float(sum(y))
  sum_x_sq = sum(xi*xi for xi in x)
  sum_y_sq = sum(yi*yi for yi in y)
  psum = sum(xi*yi for xi, yi in zip(x, y))
  num = psum - (sum_x * sum_y/n)
  den = pow((sum_x_sq - pow(sum_x, 2) / n) * (sum_y_sq - pow(sum_y, 2) / n), 0.5)
  if den == 0: return 0
  return num / den

The following code is a straight-up interpretation of the definition:

import math

def average(x):
    assert len(x) > 0
    return float(sum(x)) / len(x)

def pearson_def(x, y):
    assert len(x) == len(y)
    n = len(x)
    assert n > 0
    avg_x = average(x)
    avg_y = average(y)
    diffprod = 0
    xdiff2 = 0
    ydiff2 = 0
    for idx in range(n):
        xdiff = x[idx] - avg_x
        ydiff = y[idx] - avg_y
        diffprod += xdiff * ydiff
        xdiff2 += xdiff * xdiff
        ydiff2 += ydiff * ydiff

    return diffprod / math.sqrt(xdiff2 * ydiff2)

Test:

print pearson_def([1,2,3], [1,5,7])

returns

0.981980506062

This agrees with Excel, this calculator, SciPy (also NumPy), which return 0.981980506 and 0.9819805060619657, and 0.98198050606196574, respectively.

R:

> cor( c(1,2,3), c(1,5,7))
[1] 0.9819805

EDIT: Fixed a bug pointed out by a commenter.

You can do this with pandas.DataFrame.corr, too:

import pandas as pd
a = [[1, 2, 3],
     [5, 6, 9],
     [5, 6, 11],
     [5, 6, 13],
     [5, 3, 13]]
df = pd.DataFrame(data=a)
df.corr()

This gives

          0         1         2
0  1.000000  0.745601  0.916579
1  0.745601  1.000000  0.544248
2  0.916579  0.544248  1.000000

Pearson coefficient calculation using pandas in python: I would suggest trying this approach since your data contains lists. It will be easy to interact with your data and manipulate it from the console since you can visualise your data structure and update it as you wish. You can also export the data set and save it and add new data out of the python console for later analysis. This code is simpler and contains less lines of code. I am assuming you need a few quick lines of code to screen your data for further analysis

Example:

data = {'list 1':[2,4,6,8],'list 2':[4,16,36,64]}

import pandas as pd #To Convert your lists to pandas data frames convert your lists into pandas dataframes

df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns = ['list 1','list 2'])

from scipy import stats # For in-built method to get PCC

pearson_coef, p_value = stats.pearsonr(df["list 1"], df["list 2"]) #define the columns to perform calculations on
print("Pearson Correlation Coefficient: ", pearson_coef, "and a P-value of:", p_value) # Results 

However, you did not post your data for me to see the size of the data set or the transformations that might be needed before the analysis.