Find Correlation of One Variable with All Other Variables in R

To find the correlation of each variable with remaining variables, we can create a correlation matrix but for the correlation of only one variable with all the other variables we need to define the columns inside the cor function. The output will represent the columns and rows as passed inside the function.

Example1

 Live Demo

Consider the below data frame −

x1<−rnorm(20)
x2<−rnorm(20,5)
x3<−rnorm(20,1)
x4<−rnorm(20,1,0.004)
df1<−data.frame(x1,x2,x3,x4)
df1

Output

x1 x2 x3 x4
1 0.218668324 5.259419 −0.729656992 0.9970744
2 −0.449469183 3.988644 1.643049356 1.0019346
3 −1.320063760 4.645783 0.945824833 1.0002887
4 0.900912365 4.915662 0.281402826 0.9997605
5 −1.277076293 4.106256 0.209859279 1.0020822
6 0.208085001 6.148850 1.202134387 1.0029056
7 0.168713334 5.065017 −0.747802047 1.0043622
8 −1.520794265 4.296433 0.798054984 1.0059425
9 0.650796875 3.454918 −0.830742647 1.0009890
10 −0.001671951 5.115431 0.898794442 0.9961067
11 −0.453247780 4.329456 1.766517821 0.9925434
12 −1.116829477 4.277810 0.404241362 1.0013094
13 −1.740383204 5.832924 0.502051096 0.9960360
14 2.056005104 4.146595 1.938634058 1.0015199
15 0.180966542 3.897272 1.229711042 1.0004884
16 −0.541882877 5.711087 2.339226199 0.9962318
17 −1.297807469 4.744936 0.006237027 1.0019933
18 −0.597723769 5.621779 1.213939466 1.0029180
19 −1.247040400 5.014155 0.453961227 0.9979829
20 1.114721291 5.809178 −0.161838355 0.9876081

Finding the correlation of x1 with x2, x3, and x4 −

cor(as.matrix(df1[,1]),as.matrix(df1[,−1]))

Output

x2 x3 x4
[1,] −0.03973847 −0.02350932 −0.1992056

Example2

 Live Demo

y1<−rpois(20,5)
y2<−rpois(20,1)
y3<−rpois(20,2)
y4<−rpois(20,10)
y5<−rpois(20,2)
y6<−rpois(20,4)
df2<−data.frame(y1,y2,y3,y4,y5,y6)
df2

Output

y1 y2 y3 y4 y5 y6
1 6 1 3 16 1 3
2 6 1 2 8 3 5
3 6 0 1 9 3 3
4 8 0 3 10 1 3
5 4 2 6 10 3 2
6 4 1 3 9 3 6
7 7 1 3 10 3 4
8 2 2 0 3 4 5
9 1 1 1 11 0 5
10 7 0 5 9 1 4
11 7 0 6 7 0 3
12 4 1 4 11 2 4
13 9 3 2 6 1 3
14 5 0 3 6 1 6
15 6 3 6 11 2 3
16 6 2 4 11 3 5
17 6 1 7 8 1 4
18 3 1 6 14 1 7
19 3 4 2 13 2 5
20 5 0 3 7 2 6

Finding the correlation of y1 with remaining variables in df2 −

Example

cor(as.matrix(df2[,1]),as.matrix(df2[,−1]))

Output

y2 y3 y4 y5 y6
[1,] −0.1807339 0.2322878 −0.1330579 −0.1659442 −0.5139047