Calculate point-biserial and biserial correlations using R

When a correlation, usually Person type correlation, is calculated, two variables have to be continuous. But this requirement does not excludes the situation when one of the two variables is a dichotomous (binary) distributed. Say if we want to measure the correlations between height and gender for a group of people, the variable gender has clear dichotomous values. This kind of Pearson correlation is called point-biserial correlation, because the value for gender variable is strictly 0 or 1.

How to create factor variables in R programming

Categorical variables, including nominal and ordinal variables in R programming language are called factor variables. For example, gender(male/female) is nominal, and survey results (excellent, good, normal, bad) have ordinal values. Categorical variables are useful because many data analysis operations are related to values in different categories, such as contingency tables between two categorical variables for independence analysis, hypothesis testing of homogeneity of variances, just name a few.