Directional footrule-coefficients

Abstract: Rank-based dependence measures such as Spearman's footrule are robust and invariant, but they often fail to capture directional or asymmetric dependence in multivariate settings. This paper introduces a new family of directional Spearman's footrule coefficients for multivariate data, defined within the copula framework to clearly separate marginal behavior from dependence structure. We establish their main theoretical properties, showing full consistency with the classical footrule, including behavior under independence and extreme dependence, as well as symmetry and reflection properties. Nonparametric rank-based estimators are proposed and their asymptotic consistency is discussed. Explicit expressions for several known families of copulas illustrate the ability of the proposed coefficients to detect directional dependence patterns undetected by classical measures.