4 ms·

That's part of it, but drawing a linear fit through the data shown in the article is outrageously misleading in itself, and should be rejected outright.

• xenocyon 7y ago
  There's nothing inherently wrong with a linear fit and a linear model is often more accurate than a more ostensibly correct-looking polynomial or complex function which overfits the observed data. Perhaps you mean that drawing any kind of fit though this data is misleading, when lacking confidence statistics and R2 score - although you could have all those and still do poorly on held-out data, or you could even do well on held-out data and still be victim to confounders or misunderstanding the direction of causation... I see a line through data as nothing more than a hypothesis, which needs to be backed up with rigor. If it's backed up, there's nothing outrageous about it.
  • Tarq0n 7y ago
    The residuals of this model look really bad though, and that should tell you that there's insufficient predictive value. I'd at a minimum use a piecewise fir, or simply not fit a model without further predictors.