Kendall's tau
- noun
- /ˈkɛndəlz taʊ/
- Specialized
- The analysis revealed that Kendall's tau indicated a strong relationship between the participants' preferences for the products.
Examples
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For the Z value and Kendall's tau of the MK test, similar to linear trend, the SPI has displayed decreasing trends at 12 stations.
Academic text (2018) -
The correlation between the SB5 and the WISC-III using Kendall's tau b was .341.
Academic text (2006) -
Figure 3 shows the spatial difference of Kendall's tau in Xilingol.
Academic text (2018) -
Fig. 3: Spatial distribution of Kendall's tau during the pasture growing season over Xilingol; see PDF for image.
Academic text (2018) -
A completed description of Kendall's tau computation can be found in Wang et al. (2015b).
Academic text (2018) -
Since the assumption of normality can be questioned with scores this extreme, Kendall's tau b and Spearman's rho were calculated.
Academic text (2006) -
In most of the stations, the Z value range is from -1.081 to -0.245, and Kendall’s tau varies from -0.104 to -0.024.
Academic text (2018) -
In research studies, Kendall's tau is often used to measure the correlation between the two sets of rankings.
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To determine the level of agreement in the survey responses, researchers calculated Kendall's tau for the collected data.
Synonyms
A number that shows how much two ordered lists agree
A number that shows how well two rankings agree
A number that shows how similar the order of items is in two lists
A number that shows how similar two ordered lists are
A number that shows how closely two sets of ranked scores move together
A number that shows how much people agree about the order of items
Surface Forms
Morphology
Kendall's + tau
This is an eponymous technical term: the constituents are a proper name (Kendall's) and a Greek letter (tau), which do not encode the meaning 'a nonparametric measure of association between rankings'. Knowing the two words does not allow a B1 learner to infer the statistical function or sense, so the expression is specialized jargon and opaque.
Etymology
Kendall's tau gets its name from the statistician Maurice Kendall and the Greek letter tau. The idea is to look at every pair of items in two rankings and see if each pair stays in the same order, so that's why it measures the amount of 'agreement' between rankings.