Correction for attenuation is a statistical procedure developed by Charles Spearman in 1904 that is used to "rid a correlation coefficient from the weakening effect of measurement error", a phenomenon known as regression dilution. In measurement and statistics, the correction is also called disattenuation. The correction assures that the correlation across data units between two sets of variables is estimated in a manner that accounts for error contained within the measurement of those variables.
Background
Estimates of correlations between variables are diluted by measurement error. Disattenuation provides for a more accurate estimate of the correlation by accounting for this effect.
Formula
Let and be the true values of two attributes of some person or statistical unit. These values are variables by virtue of the assumption that they differ for different statistical units in the population. Let and be estimates of and derived either directly by observation-with-error or from application of a measurement model, such as the Rasch model. Also, let where and are the measurement errors associated with the estimates and. The estimated correlation between two sets of estimates is which, assuming the errors are uncorrelated with each other and with the true attribute values, gives where is the separation index of the set of estimates of, which is analogous to Cronbach's alpha; that is, in terms of classical test theory, is analogous to a reliability coefficient. Specifically, the separation index is given as follows: where the mean squared standard error of person estimate gives an estimate of the variance of the errors,. The standard errors are normallyproduced as a by-product of the estimation process. The disattenuated estimate of the correlation between the two sets of parameter estimates is therefore That is, the disattenuated correlation estimate is obtained by dividing the correlation between the estimates by the geometric mean of the separation indices of the two sets of estimates. Expressed in terms of classicaltest theory, the correlation is divided by the geometric mean of the reliability coefficients of two tests. Given two random variables and measured as and with measured correlation and a known reliability for each variable, and, the estimated correlation between and corrected for attenuation is How well the variables are measured affects the correlation of X and Y. The correction for attenuation tells one what the estimated correlation is expected to be if one could measure X′ and Y′ with perfect reliability. Thus if and are taken to be imperfect measurements of underlying variables and with independent errors, then estimates the true correlation between and.
