The Randomized Dependence Coefficient

Abstract

We introduce the Randomized Dependence Coefficient (RDC), a measure of non-linear dependence between random variables of arbitrary dimension based on the Hirschfeld-Gebelein-R\'enyi Maximum Correlation Coefficient. RDC is defined in terms of correlation of random non-linear copula projections; it is invariant with respect to marginal distribution transformations, has low computational cost and is easy to implement: just five lines of R code, included at the end of the paper.