Spurious relationship
In statistics, a spurious relationship or spurious correlation is a mathematical relationship in which two or more events or variables are associated but not causally related, due to either coincidence or the presence of a certain third, unseen factor (referred to as a "common response variable", "confounding factor", or "lurking variable"). == Examples == An example of a spurious relationship can be found in the time-series literature, where a spurious regression is one that provides misleading statistical evidence of a linear relationship between independent non-stationary variables.