Spearman correlation and ties

Question

I'm computing Spearman's rho on small sets of paired rankings. Spearman is well known for not handling ties properly. For example, taking 2 sets of 8 rankings, even if 6 are ties in one of the two sets, the correlation is still very high:

> cor.test(c(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8), c(0,0,0,0,0,0,7,8), method="spearman")      Spearman's rank correlation rho  S = 19.8439, p-value = 0.0274  sample estimates:       rho  0.7637626   Warning message:  Cannot compute exact p-values with ties 

The p-value <.05 seems like a pretty high statistical significance for this data. Is there a ties-corrected version of Spearman in R? What is the best formula to date to compute it with a lot of ties?

Answer 1

Well, Kendall tau rank correlation is also a non-parametric test for statistical dependence between two ordinal (or rank-transformed) variables--like Spearman's, but unlike Spearman's, can handle ties.

More specifically, there are three Kendall tau statistics--tau-a, tau-b, and tau-c. tau-b is specifically adapted to handle ties.

The tau-b statistic handles ties (i.e., both members of the pair have the same ordinal value) by a divisor term, which represents the geometric mean between the number of pairs not tied on x and the number not tied on y.

Kendall's tau is not Spearman's--they are not the same, but they are also quite similar. You'll have to decide, based on context, whether the two are similar enough such one can be substituted for the other.

For instance, tau-b:

Kendall_tau_b = (P - Q) / ( (P + Q + Y0)*(P + Q + X0) )^0.5 

P: number of concordant pairs ('concordant' means the ranks of each member of the pair of data points agree)

Q: number of discordant pairs

X0: number of pairs not tied on x

Y0: number of pairs not tied on y

There is in fact a variant of Spearman's rho that explicitly accounts for ties. In situations in which i needed a non-parametric rank correlation statistic, i have always chosen tau over rho. The reason is that rho sums the squared errors, whereas tau sums the absolute discrepancies. Given that both tau and rho are competent statistics and we are left to choose, a linear penalty on discrepancies (tau) has always seemed to me, a more natural way to express rank correlation. That's not a recommendation, your context might be quite different and dictate otherwise.