The earth mover's correlation

Abstract. Since Pearson's correlation was introduced at the end of the 19th century many dependence measures have appeared in the literature. In [26] we suggested four simple axioms for dependence measures of random variables that take values in Hilbert spaces. We showed that distance correlation (see [34]) satisfies all these axioms. We still need a new measure of dependence because existing measures either do not work in general metric spaces (that are not Hilbert spaces) or they do not satisfy our four simple axioms. The earth mover's correlation introduced in this paper applies in general metric spaces and satisfies our four axioms (two of them in a weaker form).