The correlations between gender equality and math scores held up under a statistical test designed to catch spurious associations.

By mixing up the trials, task-irrelevant information will be less consistent, allowing the learner to strip away the spurious associations.

Experiments involve a spurious association between the novel food and the illness which is usually induced chemically or by X-rays.

Thus, at that probability, there can be dozens of spurious associations in a single experiment.

"It is not a spurious association" that can be attributed to other factors like low socioeconomic status or genetic influence, Dr. Owens said.

Statistically sound association discovery controls this risk, in most cases reducing the risk of finding any spurious associations to a user-specified significance level.

That could result in a spurious association between sunburns and melanoma.

First, the case-control approach is not robust to differential environmental contribution, so that heterogeneity between case and control exposure could result in spurious association.

Unused associations decay, if their strength is below a certain threshold: highly relevant knowledge may not be forgotten, while spurious associations tend to disappear.

However, greater likelihood of aspirin use in the control group would only have attenuated the true risk estimate, rather than produced spurious associations.