Line Of Best Fit

The line of best fit is the coolest line in all of math. It takes a scatterplot of bivariate, two variable, data and finds the equation of line that best represents all of the data points.

By “best represents,” we mean that the line is located such that it reduces the sizes of the squared distances that all the points are from the line to the smallest value possible. More simply, it’s the line that comes the closest to all the points as a whole. Also called a linear regression line. Lines of best fit are used to predict y-values for x-values that might not already have been accounted for in the data set.