You could run the cor function on a small dataset where you know the values of tau-a and/or tau-b (either because you hand computed them, or found an example on the internet showing the difference), that would give some good evidence as to which is used.
Or you could look at the source code, R is open source afterall. On the jittering question: are you comfortable with a method that would give a different answer every time you run it? On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 9:41 PM, David Parkhurst <parkh...@imap.iu.edu> wrote: > How can I find out whether the cor function with method="Kendall" computes > Kendall's tau-a or tau-b. I understand that tau-b deals better with ties, > and I'm wanting to look for correlation in two variables that have lots of > ties (especially lots of zeroes for one of them). The information provided > by ?cor does not specify which is computed. > And a question: am I better off to jitter the variables before computing > tau, given the many ties? > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
