11420 IUPAC Gold Book - chance correlation 10.1351/goldbook.11420 11420 current 1 An artificial correlation that can arise when too many properties are screened relative to the number of available observations. If one tests 20 possible random descriptors for statistical significance in a multiple regression equation of the properties of 15 compounds, the average fitted \(R^{2}\) is \(\pu{0.81}\) even though an average of only four descriptors were included in the equation. PAC, 2016, 88, 239. 'Glossary of terms used in computational drug design, part II (IUPAC Recommendations 2015)' on page 243 (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2012-1204) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/11420/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/11420/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/11420/plain Citation: 'chance correlation' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.11420 The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms. If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org . The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using. 2026-06-14T22:03:39+00:00