Four simple axioms of dependence measures

Abstract

Recently new methods for measuring and testing dependence have appeared in the literature. One way to evaluate and compare these measures with each other and with classical ones is to consider what are reasonable and natural axioms that should hold for any measure of dependence. We propose four natural axioms for dependence measures and establish which axioms hold or fail to hold for several widely applied methods. All of the proposed axioms are satisfied by distance correlation. We prove that if a dependence measure is defined for all bounded nonconstant real valued random variables and is invariant with respect to all one-to-one measurable transformations of the real line, then the dependence measure cannot be weakly continuous. This implies that the classical maximal correlation cannot be continuous and thus its application is problematic. The recently introduced maximal information coefficient has the same disadvantage. The lack of weak continuity means that as the sample size increases the empirical values of a dependence measure do not necessarily converge to the population value.