# Spearman rank correlation

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/spearman-correlation/  
OnCo record `spearman-correlation` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Spearman's rho measures how well the ranking of one variable matches the ranking of another, from minus one to plus one, ignoring the actual values.

## Summary

Spearman's rank correlation coefficient indicates how strongly two sets of ranks are correlated (Wikipedia). Drug-response models report it per drug across cell lines (then average over drugs), and mRNA-protein concordance is reported as a per-gene Spearman across tumours; it is robust to outliers and to differences of scale between platforms, which is why it also serves as a cross-platform concordance check. A high mean correlation can hide drugs with none.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: Spearman correlation; Spearman's rho; Spearman rho; rank correlation; mean per-drug Spearman; Pearson correlation
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/spearman-correlation.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman's_rank_correlation_coefficient
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman's_rank_correlation_coefficient

## Connected records

- terms: [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Drug-response baselines and frameworks: mean-drug floor, LightGBM, DrEval, IMPROVE, DeepTTA](https://onco.cc/terms/drug-response-baselines/), [Logistic regression and nearest-centroid classifiers](https://onco.cc/terms/logistic-regression-term/), [mRNA to protein concordance](https://onco.cc/terms/mrna-protein-concordance/), [Permutation test and the Mann-Whitney U test](https://onco.cc/terms/permutation-test/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/spearman-correlation.json