What Does a Scatter Plot Line of Best Fit Mean?
Transcript
Hi, I'm Charlie Kasov, and this is, "What does a scatter plot line of best fit mean?" Now, a line of best fit on a scatter plot is the line that best represents the trend of the data in a scatter plot. So a scatter plot is a bunch of data on an x,y axis, like such. And this kind of looks like all the data's going in a line, it's not all the same, it's not exactly linear, but we can approximate it as going up at a roughly this slope. So that way we can extrapolate and say when x is further out, y will be up right along there, and that is our line of best fit. This strongly correlates. However, it's harder to draw a line of best fit in a scatter plot in which the data is all over the place. So if the data looks like the number 10, we can't really draw a line like we could sort of like that, but then we're missing all of this data, so our line doesn't really correlate to everything in the scatter plot. So a line of best fit works best when it follows along most of the data.