In statistics, Cramér's V (sometimes referred to as Cramér's phi and denoted as φc) is a measure of association between two nominal variables, giving a value between 0 and +1 (inclusive). It is based on Pearson's chi-squared statistic and was published by Harald Cramér in 1946.
φc is the intercorrelation of two discrete variables and may be used with variables having two or more levels. φc is a symmetrical measure: it does not matter which variable we place in the columns and which in the rows. Also, the order of rows/columns does not matter, so φc may be used with nominal data types or higher (notably, ordered or numerical).
Cramér's V varies from 0 (corresponding to no association between the variables) to 1 (complete association) and can reach 1 only when each variable is completely determined by the other. It may be viewed as the association between two variables as a percentage of their maximum possible variation.
φc2 is the mean square canonical correlation between the variables.
In the case of a 2 × 2 contingency table Cramér's V is equal to the absolute value of Phi coefficient.
Let a sample of size n of the simultaneously distributed variables and for be given by the frequencies
The chi-squared statistic then is:
where is the number of times the value is observed and is the number of times the value is observed.
Cramér's V is computed by taking the square root of the chi-squared statistic divided by the sample size and the minimum dimension minus 1:
where:
The p-value for the significance of V is the same one that is calculated using the Pearson's chi-squared test.
The formula for the variance of V=φc is known.
In R, the function cramerV()
from the package rcompanion
calculates V using the chisq.test function from the stats package. In contrast to the function cramersV()
from the lsr
package, cramerV()
also offers an option to correct for bias. It applies the correction described in the following section.
Cramér's V can be a heavily biased estimator of its population counterpart and will tend to overestimate the strength of association. A bias correction, using the above notation, is given by
where
and
Then estimates the same population quantity as Cramér's V but with typically much smaller mean squared error. The rationale for the correction is that under independence, .
Other measures of correlation for nominal data:
Other related articles:
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