Question

Partial correlation when the effect of variables are removed

Answer 1

In probability theory and statistics, partial correlation measures the degree of association between two random variables, with the effect of a set of controlling random variables removed. If we are interested in finding whether or to what extent there is a numerical relationship between two variables of interest, using their correlation coefficient will give misleading results if there is another, confounding, variable that is numerically related to both variables of interest. This misleading information can be avoided by controlling for the confounding variable, which is done by computing the partial correlation coefficient. This is precisely the motivation for including other right-side variables in a multiple regression