Robust Correlation Analyses: False Positive and Power Validation Using a New Open Source Matlab Toolbox

Pearson's correlation measures the strength of the association between two variables. The technique is, however, restricted to linear associations and is overly sensitive to outliers. Indeed, a single outlier can result in a highly inaccurate summary of the data. Yet, it remains the most commonly used measure of association in psychology research. Here we describe a free Matlab((R)) based toolbox (http://sourceforge.net/projects/robustcorrtool/) that computes robust measures of association between two or more random variables: the percentage-bend correlation and skipped-correlations. After illustrating how to use the toolbox, we show that robust methods, where outliers are down weighted or removed and…