In
statistics,
linear regression is an approach for modeling the relationship between a scalar
dependent variable y and one or more
explanatory variables (or independent variables) denoted
X. The case of one explanatory variable is called
simple linear regression. For more than one explanatory variable, the process is called
multiple linear regression. (This term should be distinguished from
multivariate linear regression, where multiple correlated dependent variables are predicted, rather than a single scalar variable.)