The Book of R

20SIMPLE LINEAR REGRESSION

Though straightforward comparative tests of individual statistics are useful in their own right, you’ll often want to learn more from your data. In this chapter, you’ll look at linear regression models: a suite of methods used to evaluate precisely how variables relate to each other.

Simple linear regression models describe the effect that a particular variable, called the explanatory variable, might have on the value of a continuous outcome variable, called the response variable. The explanatory variable may be continuous, discrete, or categorical, but to introduce the key concepts, I’ll concentrate on continuous explanatory ...