Looking just now for an openly licensed graphic showing a set of scatterplots that demonstrate different correlations between X and Y values, I couldn’t find one.

So here’s a quick R script for constructing one, based on a Cross Validated question/answer (Generate two variables with precise pre-specified correlation):

library(MASS)

corrdata=function(samples=200,r=0){
  data = mvrnorm(n=samples, mu=c(0, 0), Sigma=matrix(c(1, r, r, 1), nrow=2), empirical=TRUE)
  X = data[, 1]  # standard normal (mu=0, sd=1)
  Y = data[, 2]  # standard normal (mu=0, sd=1)
  data.frame(x=X,y=Y)
}

df=data.frame()
for (i in c(1,0.8,0.5,0.2,0,-0.2,-0.5,-0.8,-1)){
  tmp=corrdata(200,i)
  tmp['corr']=i
  df=rbind(df,tmp)
}

library(ggplot2)

g=ggplot(df,aes(x=x,y=y))+geom_point(size=1)
g+facet_wrap(~corr)+ stat_smooth(method='lm',se=FALSE,color='red')

And here’s an example of the result:

It’s actually a little tidier if we also add in + coord_fixed() to fix up the geometry/aspect ratio of the chart so the axes are of the same length:

So what sort of OER does that make this post?!;-)

PS methinks it would be nice to be able to use different distributions, such as a uniform distribution across x. Is there a similarly straightforward way of doing that?