spurious correlation

1. 1.

   a correlation between two variables (e.g., between the number of electric motors in the home and grades at school) that does not result from any direct relation between them (buying electric motors will not raise grades) but from their relation to other variables

   Broadercorrelation

   statistics

Questions about spurious correlation

What does spurious correlation mean?

spurious correlation means "a correlation between two variables (e.g., between the number of electric motors in the home and grades at school) that does not result from any direct relation between them (buying electric motors will not raise grades) but from their relation to other variables".

Is spurious correlation a common word?

spurious correlation is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.