Dear list members, Stats books (and common sense) typically insist that you need to examine scatter plots of your data before computing a correlation coefficient. However, I have a species-plot matrix with 150 species, for which I plan to generate a correlation matrix as a start for further analysis. (I'm using the Spearman rank-order correlation to be on the safe side.) That works out to 11,175 pairwise scatter plots! What do you recommend I do in order to get a feel for the data and diagnose potential problems without looking at all of them?
Thanks in advance, and I'll post a summary of responses. Jane Shevtsov -- ------------- Jane Shevtsov Ecology Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia co-founder, <www.worldbeyondborders.org> Check out my blog, <http://perceivingwholes.blogspot.com>Perceiving Wholes "The whole person must have both the humility to nurture the Earth and the pride to go to Mars." --Wyn Wachhorst, The Dream of Spaceflight
