HNC Business Logo

line
Home - Units - News - Links - Articles - Handouts - Books - Discussion - Unit 1 - Unit 2 - Unit 3 - Unit 4 - Unit 5 - Unit 6 - Unit 7 - Unit 8 - Blog

Unit 6: Business Decision Making - Information in appropriate formats

Scatter (XY) graphs and linear trend lines

Extrapolation for forecasting — reliability

Scattergraphs

A scattergraph is a plot of two sets of data.

Interpolation can be used to make an assumption about intermediate values.

Graphs can be extended to predict future changes in the data.

The Straight Line

By drawing a straight line, we can express the line as a relationship
y = a + bx

Regression Line

By drawing a straight line, we can plot a line of best fit.

Regression by Formula

By using a mathematical method called the "Method of Least Squares" it is possible to find the values of a and b for y = a + bx in order to find a regression line.

The Regression Formula

Limitations of Regression

An assumption is made with the regression line that it is where it should be.

You can not assume that the regression line is valid outside the range of the data.

You can interpolate, but you can not extrapolate.

line

Home - Units - News - Links - Articles - Handouts - Books - Discussion - Unit 1 - Unit 2 - Unit 3 - Unit 4 - Unit 5 - Unit 6 - Unit 7 - Unit 8 - Blog

Data Sources

Primary data- consists of data collected “first-hand”

Secondary data - is data collected by others

Up to 8Mb broadband from just £9.99 a month. PlusNet broadband.

All content copyright © 2007