Question

An example of two very unusual variables that are correlated.

Answer 1

Consider the two variables defined as :

X= total sell of ice cream by a particular ice cream brand in some place of a tropical country during summer

Y= total number of people visiting the local swimming pools of that region during the same period of time.

Clearly X and Y will be very highly correlated. But there is no causal relationship between them. Sell of ice cream doesn't affect how many people will visit swimming pool. But these 2 are correlated because of the common factor: "summer".

As it is summer, so it's hot and hence people tend to eat ice cream more and for the same reason more people visit swimming pools. Hence both the values of X and Y increases as temperature increases. But X and Y are not causally related.

This type of correlation is called spurious correlation.

Hope the solution helps. Thank you.

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