AI engineering glossary · Evaluation metrics
What is spearman's rank correlation?
Spearman's rank correlation (also called Spearman's rho): The correlation between the ranks of two variables instead of their raw values. It captures any consistently rising or falling relationship, not only straight-line ones, and is less affected by outliers. It is often used to compare a metric's ordering with human judgments.
Spearman's rank correlation: an example
If an automatic quality metric ranks 10 summaries in almost the same order as human raters, Spearman's rho is close to +1, such as 0.9.
Related terms
More Evaluation metrics terms
- Specificity
- Symmetric mean absolute percentage error
- Temperature scaling
- Token-level F1
- Translation edit rate
- True negative
- True positive
- V-measure
Where you learn it
Spearman's rank correlation is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.