Saying that correlation is usually accidental is a stretch. Basing that claim on that (admittedly amusing) website is even more of a stretch: the time series on

Saying that correlation is usually accidental is a stretch. Basing that claim on that (admittedly amusing) website is even more of a stretch: the time series on that website are all highly autoregressive with minuscule sample sizes, which makes spurious correlations extremely likely [1]. Speaking (very) roughly, the fact that they are autoregressive constrains how 'kinky' the shapes can be. Visually speaking, the time series will have a small number of inflection points and will appear interpolated between these points. This greatly reduces the search space: you just need to line up a couple of kinks in a space of ten samples, or match two smooth and vaguely line-shaped objects, rather than find a convincing relationship for 100s of observations not tied together in time. [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.611.5055&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.611...