# Do you have a create a scatter plot to write a linear model?

##### 1 Answer
Oct 31, 2014

It depends, to be honest.

It depends mainly on the type of data you have. If you have exact data (with a very lucid correlation between the $x$ and $y$ coordinates) then you do not really need to create a scatter plot. You can just look at the table and see if there is some sort of correlation between your $x$ and $y$ values, and then document that correlation with your equation. This is typically the type of data you will get in most math problems.

When you have real life data (data from science experiments, statistics, etc), then you usually don't have a perfect correlation, simply due to the nature of humanity. When documenting this type of data, it is handy to set up a scatterplot of your data, and then create a trend line (or best fit line) - which is a line that passes close to all the points on your scatterplot (but doesn't necessarily touch any of them). You can then write the equation of this line, and it will be your model.

Here is a video that explains this, just in case:
Video

Hope that helped :)