RichardKennaway comments on Should correlation coefficients be expressed as angles? - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Sniffnoy 28 November 2012 12:05AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (24)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 28 November 2012 05:46:42AM 6 points [-]

All's well and good, until you get to adding angles together, unless you visualize A,B,C existing on a sphere and the angles between them being from the center of the sphere- are the possible angles of the sphere identical to the inverse cosines of the possible correlations? (If A and B are .707 correlated, and B and C are .707 correlated, are A and C necessarily somewhere between 0 and 1 correlated?)

Yes. If you have n random variables, you can restrict to the subspace spanned by them (or their equivalence classes). For instance, if we have 3 random variables whose equivalence classes are linearly independent, then the span of these equivalence classes will be a 3-dimensional real inner product space, which will then necessarily be isomorphic to R^3 with the dot product.

Actually, it occurs to me that I've never actually sat down and checked that angle addition obeys the triangle inequality in 3 dimensions -- I suppose if nothing else it can be done by lots of inequality grinding -- but that's not relevant. The point is, it does hold in dimension 3, and hence by the argument above, it holds regardless of dimension, finite or infinite.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 29 November 2012 02:20:32PM 2 points [-]

Actually, it occurs to me that I've never actually sat down and checked that angle addition obeys the triangle inequality in 3 dimensions -- I suppose if nothing else it can be done by lots of inequality grinding

The ordinary triangle inequality is immediate from -- is practically identical to -- the statement that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

The spherical triangle inequality, in any number of dimensions, is the same thing with "straight line" replaced by "great circle". A detail that doesn't arise for flat space is that there are two angles between two lines (whereas there is only one distance between two points in flat space), and you have to choose one that is no more than pi.