Eye Fitting Straight Lines
- 1 August 1981
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in The American Statistician
- Vol. 35 (3) , 150-152
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.1981.10479335
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.Keywords
This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit:
- Subjective Judgment in Statistical Analysis: An Experimental StudyJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 1951