What is the difference between correlation and causation?
As a student of the sciences, it is important that you understand the difference between correlation and causation. This inference will be especially useful as you do the ArcGIS activity section of this text because many erroneous causal links can be drawn from this type of dataset. People often make the mistake of assuming that if two things are correlated, there must be some causation involved in the relationship, which is not necessarily the case. Correlation refers to the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables. For example, if short students received higher scores on a class exam than tall students, there would be a correlation between height and exam scores (Figure 1.6). However, this does not imply a causal link between height, and test scores, as short people are not necessarily smarter than tall people. The actual cause of the correlation may be caused by a third factor, like gender for example, where females, who tend to be shorter, may have done
