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Introduce linear regression

Introduce linear regression - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Learning Excel: Data Analysis

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Introduce linear regression

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- [Instructor] One very useful technique in data analysis is least-squares regression. The idea is that you have two or more sets of numerical values and you draw a straight line that best describes the dataset. Your goal is to find the line that minimizes the total error across all of your data points, and it begins with a guess, and from there, you repeat the process. You start by visualizing your data points. Here, I have a collection of sales data. The number of customers for a given day appears on the X axis, and the sales for that day appear on the Y axis. And each point represents the intersection of the number of customers and sales. And again, our goal is to draw a line that best fits the data. So what does it mean to find the line of best fit? Well, here's the line that best describes the data, and our goal is to minimize the error between that line and each of the points. And we square that value, the distance between a particular dot and the line, so that we never have…

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