In statistics, a relationship between two variables is negative if the slope in a corresponding graph is negative, or—what is in some contexts equivalent—if the correlation between them is negative. Negative correlation is also variously called anti-correlation or indirect correlation.
Example:
"They observed a negative relationship between illness and vaccination."
As incident of vaccination is increasing, incidence of illness is decreasing, and vice versa.
Compare to a positive relationship: Observed a positive relationship between illness and missed work.
As incidence of illness increased, sick days taken also increased.
Famous quotes containing the words negative and/or relationship:
“Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if people could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)