A General Class of Weighted Rank Correlation Measures

Abstract: In this paper we propose a class of weighted rank correlation coefficients extending the Spearman's rho. The proposed class constructed by giving suitable weights to the distance between two sets of ranks to place more emphasis on items having low rankings than those have high rankings or vice versa. The asymptotic distribution of the proposed measures and properties of the parameters estimated by them are studied through the associated copula. A simulation study is performed to compare the performance of the proposed statistics for testing independence using asymptotic relative efficiency calculations.