Question

Please provide a sample scenario that can be analyzed with a simple linear regression analysis. Make sure to clearly state your predictor and criterion variables.

Answer 1

For a simple linear regression problem, we need to have two variables, both of which have to be continuous in nature. In case, we find a line : Y= a+bx, then x is the independent variable and Y is the dependent variable. We can also, generalise to multiple linear regression problem. Where we can have many independent variables and 1 dependent variable. The predictor variable is analogous to an independent variable and criterion variable is analogous to the dependent variable.

Example:

Suppose you think that a person's muscle mass decreases with age. Then, you could have a dataset where one variable would be a person's age and the other would be the person's muscle mass. X: Age, Y:Muscle mass.

Then X would be the predictor variable and Y would be the criterion variable.