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.

Charlie Kasov has been tutoring high school mathematics since 2004. He is qualified to teach several math subjects, including geometry, algebra, trigonometry and probability.

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