Solved – What’s the formula of normalized correlation

correlationmachine learning

I read a paper which used normalized correlation to evaluate the distance between two vectors. But I searched on the Internet and found little about normalized correlations, but I still got some clues. In one paper the formula for normalized correlation is given as follows:

$$dc(y_1,y_2) = \frac{y_1^T y_2}{|y_1||y_2|}$$

I was confused that it's just the cosine similarity formula! So what on earth is the formula of normalized correlation?

Thanks in advance!

PS: I found some explanation in this article The Corrected Normalized Correlation Coefficient: A Novel Way Of Matching Score Calculation for LDA-Based Face Verification

$$ \delta_{cos}(y,\bar{y_{j}}) = \frac {y^{T} \bar{y_{j}}} { \|y\|\|\bar{y_{j}}\|} $$

In statistics, the expression above is often referred to as the normalized correlation coefficient and is used for measuring the extent to which two samples, in our case the vectors $y$ and $\bar{y_{j}}$ are linearly related. When the absolute value of the normalized correlation coefficient equals one, then there exists a linear relation between the two samples, while on the other hand, when the value of the normalized correlation coefficient equals zero, then the two samples have no linear relation. Generally, the higher the absolute value of the coefficient, the stronger the linear relation between the
two samples. Based on this fact the absolute value of the normalized correlation coefficient is commonly employed for computing the matching score between the input vector $y$ in the client template $\bar{y_{j}}$

Best Answer

I haven't come across this usage, but it seems easy to decode.

Matters may differ in your field, but within mainstream statistics, and all statistics-using disciplines I know about, correlation is understood as being by definition scaled to fall within [-1, 1]. When calculated similarly to your formula correlation is a cosine.

So the term "normalized" is just emphasizing that fact; it is not flagging a special case.

The unnormalized correlation would just be called the covariance.

So, you can't find this term being used because it is very unusual.