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Estimating the line of best fit exercise

The "line of best fit" is a line that shows the pattern of data points. If we can find a good line, it means there is a linear trend. If not, it means there is no linear trend. We can't ignore points that don't fit the trend. Created by Sal Khan.

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  • blobby green style avatar for user obeykhoi
    I love Khan academy :)))!
    (18 votes)
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  • aqualine tree style avatar for user akhstudent
    i am lost. when i do it on the practice, i am usually wrong by one or two points. is there a way to calculate this??halp!
    (11 votes)
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    • leaf green style avatar for user Mr Mills
      Here's a process you might try. Find the point that is the closest to one corner. Then, find the point that is closest to the opposite corner. Connect those two points.

      Then, look at the line you draw and compare the rest of the points to it. If there are more points above the line than below it, then you might need to move the line up some. And if there are more points below the line than above, you might need to move the line down some.

      Just experiment until you've got the line as close as possible to as many points as you can. It's OK if some points are far away, as long as your really close to most of the points.
      (8 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user caleb.washington
    Khan Academy makes it a lot easier to understand some of the difficult math tasks.
    (4 votes)
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  • female robot grace style avatar for user arcalas.jada
    Can you have a line of best fit when you have no correlation?
    (4 votes)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user love God
    How do we make predictions in scatterplots
    (4 votes)
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  • duskpin sapling style avatar for user SichihopeMisa
    so if i just do a line that is close to the other scatter points would it be right?
    (3 votes)
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  • male robot hal style avatar for user korean_default
    Honestly, I still don't get it. How would you know if it's accurate? And there's a method called Least Squares to find the equation, but how would you calculate if there are hundreds of points?
    (3 votes)
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  • mr pants purple style avatar for user Canoza, Lester
    What does best line fit mean
    (3 votes)
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  • starky ultimate style avatar for user Emilio A. Roberson
    Where are these questions? Can I practice with them?
    (2 votes)
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  • aqualine ultimate style avatar for user Hussain Ali
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    (2 votes)
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Video transcript

Find the line of best fit, or mark that there is no linear correlation. So let's see, we have a bunch of data points, and we want to find a line that at least shows the trend in the data. And this one seems a little difficult because if we ignore these three points down here, maybe we could do a line that looks something like this. It seems like it kind of approximates this trend, although this doesn't seem like a great trend. And if we ignored these two points right over, we could do something like maybe something like that. But we can't just ignore points like that. So I would say that there's actually no good line of best fit here. So let me check my answer. Let's try a couple more of these. Find the line of best-- well, this feels very similar. It really feels like there's no-- I mean, I could do that, but I'm ignoring these two points. I could do something like that, then I'd be ignoring these points. So I'd also say no good best fit line exists. So let's try one more. So here it looks like there's very clearly this trend. And I could try to fit it a little bit better than it's fit right now. So it feels like something like that fits this trend line quite well. I could maybe drop this down a little bit, something like that. Let's check my answer. A good best fit line exists. Let me check my answer. We got it right.