• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.495-509
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• 2013

We study multivariate extension of Kendall's tau and its statistical interpretation. There exist various versions of multivariate Kendall's tau, for example Scarsini (1984), Joe (1990) and Genest et al. (2011); however, few of them mention its lower bounds. For the bivariate case, the Fr$\acute{e}$chet-Hoeffding lower bound can achieve the lower bound of Kendall's tau. However in the multivariate case, the Fr$\acute{e}$chet-Hoeffding lower bound itself does not exist as a distribution, which makes the interpretation of Kendall's tau unclear when it has negative value. In this paper, we explain sufficient conditions to achieve the lower bound of Kendall's tau and provide real data examples that provide further insights into the interpretation for the lower bounds of Kendall's tau.