Asymptotic Inference for Rank Correlations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pohle, Marc-Oliver, Wermuth, Jan-Lukas, Weiß, Christian H.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Pohle, Marc-Oliver
Wermuth, Jan-Lukas
Weiß, Christian H.
author_facet Pohle, Marc-Oliver
Wermuth, Jan-Lukas
Weiß, Christian H.
contents Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho are widely used tools for measuring dependence. Surprisingly, when it comes to asymptotic inference for these rank correlations, some fundamental results and methods have not yet been developed, in particular for discrete random variables and in the time series case, and concerning variance estimation in general. Consequently, asymptotic confidence intervals are not available. We provide a comprehensive treatment of asymptotic inference for classical rank correlations, including Kendall's tau, Spearman's rho, Goodman-Kruskal's gamma, Kendall's tau-b, and grade correlation. We derive asymptotic distributions for both iid and time series data, resorting to asymptotic results for U-statistics, and introduce consistent variance estimators. This enables the construction of confidence intervals and tests, generalizes classical results for continuous random variables and leads to corrected versions of widely used tests of independence. We analyze the finite-sample performance of our variance estimators, confidence intervals, and tests in simulations and illustrate their use in case studies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14609
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Asymptotic Inference for Rank Correlations
Pohle, Marc-Oliver
Wermuth, Jan-Lukas
Weiß, Christian H.
Methodology
Econometrics
Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho are widely used tools for measuring dependence. Surprisingly, when it comes to asymptotic inference for these rank correlations, some fundamental results and methods have not yet been developed, in particular for discrete random variables and in the time series case, and concerning variance estimation in general. Consequently, asymptotic confidence intervals are not available. We provide a comprehensive treatment of asymptotic inference for classical rank correlations, including Kendall's tau, Spearman's rho, Goodman-Kruskal's gamma, Kendall's tau-b, and grade correlation. We derive asymptotic distributions for both iid and time series data, resorting to asymptotic results for U-statistics, and introduce consistent variance estimators. This enables the construction of confidence intervals and tests, generalizes classical results for continuous random variables and leads to corrected versions of widely used tests of independence. We analyze the finite-sample performance of our variance estimators, confidence intervals, and tests in simulations and illustrate their use in case studies.
title Asymptotic Inference for Rank Correlations
topic Methodology
Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14609