Dear all, The next seminar in our series of statistics talks for people interested in quantitative methods in biology and medicine will take place on Thursday 29 November at 11h00 in the Salle Delachaux (Biopôle 2, premier étage, Route de la Corniche 10, Lausanne, M2: Vennes). The speaker will be Yadolah Dodge from the University of Neuchâtel, who will talk about "Correlation" --- Abstract: The word correlation is a wonderful example of a word that started out as a general term and proved to be so useful in various fields of study that it developed more specialized senses over time. In the 19th century, scholars of various disciplines adopted the term correlation to their specific areas of interest. After examining forearm and height measurements, Galton introduced the concept of correlation in 1888. In statistics, the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient or Pearson's r is a measure of the linear dependence between two variables X and Y. It is widely used in the sciences as a measure of the strength of linear dependence between two variables. In this talk we introduce different formulas for the correlation coefficient for different applications. In particular, we discuss the third and the fourth power of r for determining the direction of dependency in linear regression. Keywords. Causality. Correlation coefficient. Linear regression. Response variable. Kurtosis coefficient. Coefficient of variation. Skewness coefficient. References: Dodge, Y. and Yadegari, I. (2013). Correlation and its Applications. To appear. --- You can find more information about the forum on our web page at http://moodle.unil.ch/course/view.php?id=2729 Hope to see you there ! Frédéric (for the organizers: Jérôme Goudet, Valentin Rousson, Frédéric Schütz)