Interpreting Spearman values from alpha-correlation outputs

Hello, I collected sequences along an environmental O2 gradient and I want to look at how alpha diversity metrics change as a function of O2 concentration.

For example, I used the alpha-correlation method to generate this plot of Faith PD vs. O2:

alpha_correlation_faith_pd_O2_metadata.tsv (3.0 KB)

faith-pd-correlation_PAL.qzv (386.6 KB)

The plot makes sense to me, but I do not understand how to interpret the calculated Spearman values (Test Statistic = 0.5164; P-Value = 0.0011). Could someone please explain to me what these values mean in this instance? Or maybe someone could link a reference or previous post that explains how to read these values?

Thank you!

Hello!

Under the hood this function uses scipy.stats.spearmanr.

The test statistic is the Spearman correlation coefficient (Rho) for these two variables.

The p-value for a hypothesis test whose null hypothesis is that two sets of data are linearly uncorrelated.

I hope this helps!

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Hi Colin,

That's exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much!

Cheers!

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