Spurious relationship

Spurious relationships are relationships that appear to exist between two things, but actually don't. For example, a scientist may look at two sets of data - the number of apples eaten in a day and the average height of people in a room. Even though these two things have nothing to do with each other, there may appear to be a relationship between them. In this situation, the scientist would say that the relationship is spurious because it doesn't actually exist.