[R] correlation significance testing with multiple factor levels

Jack Tanner ihok at hotmail.com
Fri Jan 22 00:07:34 CET 2010


[Apologies in advance if this is too "statistics" and not enough "R".]

I've got an experiment with two sets of treatments. Each subject either received
all treatments from set A or all treatments from set B. 

I can compute the N pairwise correlations for all treatments in either set using
cor(). If I take the mean of these N pairwise correlations, I see that the
effects of treatments in set A are much more correlated than the effects of
treatments in set B. (Mean correlation for set A is 0.6, mean for set B is 0.1).
This is probably wrongheaded, but I'd like to be able to report whether this is
a significant difference. I know about cor.test(), but I don't know whether/how
I can adapt that for my use case.

Thanks in advance for your advice.



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