Introduction to trend lines
By the end of this section, you’ll have a firm grasp of trend lines, the foundation of regression analysis.
Let’s begin with a practical example. Suppose you own an e-commerce store and have been recording your daily sales for the past few months. With a list of numbers at hand, you’re curious about any patterns in the data that could inform your business decisions. This is where trend lines come into play.
A trend line is a line that represents the general direction or pattern in a dataset. It allows us to visualize the relationship between data points and helps us make predictions about future values. In simple terms, it connects the dots in a way that best illustrates the overall trend.
Returning to our e-commerce store scenario, imagine plotting your daily sales on a graph, with days on the horizontal axis and sales on the vertical axis. Each day’s sales become a data point on the graph. Your goal is to draw a line...
