dumb stats question i am embarrassed about the basicness of it so im hiding it in thread below, but i would like help understanding
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i think i know roughly how correlations work - if u plot the values, u can get a trendline (the line that minimizes distance from line to all the points). if u then take this line and calculate square root of distance from line to points... something something correlation
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like, if all the points are real far from the line, its low correlation, if all the points are close to the line, its high correlation
but i don't understand the relationship of this to the slope of the line itself?
Replying to
like what does it *mean* for there to be a real strong trend slope with an r of 0.02? Or weak with r of .9? is that even possible? what does this even mean about the data?
i conceive of correlations as about predictive power - given knowledge of X, how can we predict Y?
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im getting confused cause i have a data finding where i had ppl select how much they liked... let's call it ice cream, on a 0-3 scale. I also asked... let's say, how much butter did you eat growing up?
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and found that people liked ice cream 3/3, reported double the amount of childhood butter consumption than ppl who like ice cream at 0/3.
This is a *trendline* I'm finding here, right? a consistent increase in avg ice cream preference per degree of childhood butter consumption
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i feel like i should be able to make strongish predictions off of this. If you tell me you're into ice cream 3/3, I should 2x my estimate of how much butter consumption was in your childhood, right? This *feels* like a strong thing to me.
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But my actual correlation for this data is r=0.08, which is very tiny! Is it that correlations aren't supposed to tell me the dramaticness of my prediction, but rather the reliability of it? Should I 2x my estimate of butter consumption but i'm only ~1% more likely to be right?
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I don't even know how to conceive of that, it's breaking my brain. Or is this all impossible and I just probably made a mistake in my data? I kinda feel like I'm asking the wrong question in here somewhere.
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(and to clarify, the trendline is a linear trendline when i graph out the average scores, there's not like a secret bell curve in there to wipe out the correlation for me)
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why am i so triggered by all the responses explaining things to me that i thought i clearly laid out as understanding in my thread
its surprisingly upsetting, i am resisting urges to block everyone
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GUYS I AM AWARE THAT THE SLOPE OF THE LINE IS NOT THE SAME AS CORRELATION, PLEASE STOP TELLING ME THIS
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Replying to
i KNOW the slope of the line isn't correlation, im asking if there's a relationship at all
like is it possible for there to be a steep slope with no correlation
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