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# scipy.stats.kendalltau

`scipy.stats.``kendalltau`(x, y, initial_lexsort=True)

  Calculates Kendall’s tau, a correlation measure for ordinal data.

  Kendall’s tau is a measure of the correspondence between two rankings. Values close to 1 indicate strong agreement, values close to -1 indicate strong disagreement. This is the tau-b version of Kendall’s tau which accounts for ties.

  Parameters : | x, y : array_like Arrays of rankings, of the same shape. If arrays are not 1-D, they will be flattened to 1-D. initial_lexsort : bool, optional Whether to use lexsort or quicksort as the sorting method for the initial sort of the inputs. Default is lexsort (True), for which `kendalltau` is of complexity O(n log(n)). If False, the complexity is O(n^2), but with a smaller pre-factor (so quicksort may be faster for small arrays).
  Returns : | Kendall’s tau : float The tau statistic. p-value : float The two-sided p-value for a hypothesis test whose null hypothesis is an absence of association, tau = 0.

  Notes

  The definition of Kendall’s tau that is used is:

      tau = (P - Q) / sqrt((P + Q + T) * (P + Q + U))

  where P is the number of concordant pairs, Q the number of discordant pairs, T the number of ties only in x, and U the number of ties only in y. If a tie occurs for the same pair in both x and y, it is not added to either T or U.

  References

  W.R. Knight, “A Computer Method for Calculating Kendall’s Tau with Ungrouped Data”, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 61, No. 314, Part 1, pp. 436-439, 1966.

  Examples

      >>> x1 = [12, 2, 1, 12, 2]
      >>> x2 = [1, 4, 7, 1, 0]
      >>> tau, p_value = sp.stats.kendalltau(x1, x2)
      >>> tau
      -0.47140452079103173
      >>> p_value
      0.24821309157521476

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