Question

In two or more complete sentences describe how to determine the appropriate model for the set of data, (0,2), (2,3), (5,4), (10,5).

Answer 1

The very first thing to do in every correlation activity is to plot the gathered data points in a scatter plot. It is better to use software tools like MS Excel because they have a feature there that uses linear regression like that one shown in the picture.

Once you plot the data points, make a trendline. You are given with options. If you want a linear function, then you will have a linear model with a function equation of y = 0.2907x + 2.2643. It has a correlation coefficient of 0.9595. That's a strong correlation already. The R² value tells how good your model fits the data points. If you want to increase the R², a better model would be a quadratic function with the equation, y = -0.0209x²+0.506x+2.0232. As you can see the R² increase even more to 0.9992.