The Confidence Density for Correlation

Abstract

Inference for correlation is central in statistics. From a Bayesian viewpoint, the final most complete outcome of inference for the correlation is the posterior distribution. An explicit formula for the posterior density for the correlation for the binormal is derived. This posterior is an optimal confidence distribution and corresponds to a standard objective prior. It coincides with the fiducial introduced by R.A. Fisher in 1930 in his first paper on fiducial inference. C.R. Rao derived an explicit elegant formula for this fiducial density, but the new formula using hypergeometric functions is better suited for numerical calculations. Several examples on real data are presented for illustration. A brief review of the connections between confidence distributions and Bayesian and fiducial inference is given in an Appendix.