IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-1-4612-2856-1_45.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Fallacy of Shotgun Correlations for Software Measures

In: Computing Science and Statistics

Author

Listed:
  • Richard E. Courtney

    (Tulane University, Computer Science)

  • David A. Gustafson

    (Kansas State University, Computing and Information Sciences)

Abstract

Many software measures have been forwarded on the simple basis of a high linear correlation coefficient with some measurable quantities. The linear correlation coefficient is an unreliable statistic for deciding whether an observed correlation indicates significant association. Several published software measure experiments collected upwards of 20 different measurements or have fourteen or fewer observations. With considerable data from small samples, the probability of “discovering” a “significant” correlation is high. We present a computer simulation experiment where the correlation between sets of randomly generated numbers is calculated. We also look at randomly generated numbers in the ranges that would be expected in Halstead’s Software Science measures. Our results show that the average maximum linear correlation for randomly generated numbers is.70 or higher if the sample size is low compared to the number of variables. Alternative statistical approaches to obtain meaningful significant results is presented.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard E. Courtney & David A. Gustafson, 1992. "The Fallacy of Shotgun Correlations for Software Measures," Springer Books, in: Connie Page & Raoul LePage (ed.), Computing Science and Statistics, pages 318-322, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4612-2856-1_45
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4612-2856-1_45
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-1-4612-2856-1_45. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.