Table 4

true correlation

0.5

0.7

0.9

BWC

SP

BWC

SP

BWC

SP

sample size

10

0.894

0.918

0.874

0.802

0.853

0.529

20

0.900

0.894

0.896

0.788

0.892

0.535

50

0.898

0.878

0.915

0.795

0.920

0.607

100

0.910

0.888

0.912

0.791

0.908

0.608

Efficiency of biweight correlation (BWC) vs. Spearman (SP) correlation. All values are simulated variance of correlation of interest (biweight or Spearman) divided by the variance of the Pearson correlation. Simulations are based on 10,000 samples of standard normal bivariate data sets with the appropriate sample size and correlation.

Hardin et al. BMC Bioinformatics 2007 8:220   doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-220