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The American Statistician Volume 35, 1981 - Issue 3
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The Teacher's Corner

Eye Fitting Straight Lines

Frederick Mosteller Department of Niostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA
,
Andrew F. Siegel Department of Statistics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA
,
Edward Trapido Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA
&
Cleo Youtz Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
Pages 150-152 | Received 01 Jun 1980, Published online: 12 Mar 2012
 
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Abstract

Because little is known about properties of lines fitted by eye, we designed and carried out an empirical investigation. Inexperienced graduate and postdoctoral students instructed to locate a line for estimating y from x for four sets of points tended to choose slopes near that of the first principal component (major axis) of the data, and their lines passed close to the centroids. Students had a slight tendency to choose consistently either steeper or shallower slopes for all sets of data.

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