Announcement

Frank Anscombe's Regression Examples

The intimate relationship between correlation and regression raises the question of whether it is possible for a regression analysis to be misleading in the same sense as the set of scatterplots all of which had a correlation coefficient of 0.70. In 1973, Frank Anscombe published a set of examples showing the answer is a definite yes (Anscombe FJ (1973), "Graphs in Statistical Analysis," The American Statistician, 27, 17-21). Anscombe's examples share not only the same correlation coefficient, but also the same value for any other summary statistic that is usually calculated.

n 11
9.0
7.5
Regression equation
of y on x
y = 3 + 0.5 x
110.0
Regression SS27.5
Residual SS13.75 (9 df)
Estimated SE of b10.118
r0.816
R20.667

Figure 1 is the picture drawn by the mind's eye when a simple linear regression equation is reported. Yet, the same summary statistics apply to figure 2, which shows a perfect curvilinear relation, and to figure 3, which shows a perfect linear relation except for a single outlier.

The summary statistics also apply to figure 4, which is the most troublesome. Figures 2 and 3 clearly call the straight line relation into question. Figure 4 does not. A straight line may be appropriate in the fourth case. However, the regression equation is determined entirely by the single observation at x=19. Paraphrasing Anscombe, we need to know the relation between y and x and the special contribution of the observation at x=19 to that relation.

x y1 y2 y3 x4 y4
10 8.04 9.14 7.46 8 6.58
8 6.95 8.14 6.77 8 5.76
13 7.58 8.74 12.74 8 7.71
9 8.81 8.77 7.11 8 8.84
11 8.33 9.26 7.81 8 8.47
14 9.96 8.10 8.84 8 7.04
6 7.24 6.13 6.08 8 5.25
4 4.26 3.10 5.39 19 12.50
12 10.84 9.13 8.15 8 5.56
7 4.82 7.26 6.42 8 7.91
5 5.68 4.74 5.73 8 6.89


Copyright © 2000 Gerard E. Dallal