This is one of the rare articles which applies linear regression to something which is linear by nature (I am assuming good faith from the authors when they use

This is one of the rare articles which applies linear regression to something which is linear by nature (I am assuming good faith from the authors when they use "intuitively" to mean mean "we know our model is linear because <something>") Whenever I look at generic information (news, newspapers, generic articles), someone is taking a cloud of points and, bam!, draws a straight line through them. I actually reached to some authors to ask why they did that. Answers (if any) were varied, I had I think one person who actually said that the data is expected to be linear. Many could not see the point, up to "if it looks like a line, then we put a line".