Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS

A Pictorial Walk through Regression

The Simplest Case

Now that we have discussed the broad aims behind linear regression, let us take a look at how this is achieved through a pictorial explanation, using the following simple linear example.

Let us begin with an example. Say you are an HR researcher. Continuing with the sales example, you might wish to investigate the predictors of sales figures among a sales force. Therefore sales is the dependent variable (DV), which you operationalize as average dollars sold per annum. You choose a range of possible predictors or independent variables (IVs), which could be anything relevant, such as salesperson age, education, attitudes, behaviors, economic variables, and the like. Let us just look at ...