a statistic measuring the degree of correlation between two variables as by dividing their covariance by the square root of the product of their variances. The closer the correlation coefficient is to 1 or –1 the greater the correlation; if it is random, the coefficient is zero
See also Pearson's correlation coefficient, Spearman's rank-order coefficient
correlation coefficient in American English
Statistics
any of several measures of concomitant variation in two or more variables