On Nonsymmetric Nonparametric Measures of Dependence

Abstract

Based on recent progress in research on copula based dependence measures, we review the original Renyi's axioms on symmetric measures and propose a new set of axioms that applies to nonsymmetric measures. We show that nonsymmetric measures can actually better characterize the relationship between a pair of random variables including both independence and complete dependence. The new measures also satisfy the Data Processing Inequality (DPI) on the * product on copulas, which leads to nice features including the invariance of dependence measure under bijective transformation on one of the random variables. The issues with symmetric measures are also clarified.