Regression Analysis 70-208

• Professor Maria M. Ferreyra

– 241 Posner
– Tel: 8-1829
– mferrey@andrew.cmu.edu
• Lectures: M-W 1:30-2:20p, 2:30-3:20p
• Recitations: F 1:30-2:20p, 2:30-3:20p
• Teaching Assistants:

– Ziya Genceren

– Dimitri Perekhodstev

– Sunil Wattal
Regression Analysis

An Introduction to the Class

 How can we use Regression
Analysis? An Example
• We run a business that cleans office buildings
within a given time (one evening, say).
• Buildings differ in size (number of rooms)
• We work with cleaning crews of 3 people each
• We send different numbers of crews to different
buildings, depending on the building size.
• We have recorded our own operations over the last
months
Number of Crews - Histogram
Number of Rooms Cleaned
 What if we used 7 crews?
• No observations for 7 crews
 What if we used 7 crews?

• RoomsClean = 1.78 + 3.70 * NumberOfCrews

• If we use 7 crews, we expect to clean

1.78 + 3.70 * 7 = 28 rooms
When should we use Regression
Analysis rather than the
Conditional Mean Function?
• When no observations for that value of x –
or few observations
• When we know “something” about the
population, regardless of the number of
observations for each value of x.
 Are we getting the “right”
answer?
• There is error associated to our answer 
quantify the error
• Why a straight line?
• Maybe other variables matter, too…
 Other things we could examine
using Regression
• Wages and tenure
• Growth trend in the American economy in
the last twenty years
• Housing prices and house size
• Stock prices trend
 A few tips to succeed in this
class…
• A quantitative class  don’t cram!
• Revise notes after EACH lecture
• Come see me or the TA’s
• Work on problem sets
• Use answer keys
• Do the reading
A couple more announcements…
• Next lecture – readings on Blackboard
(“Course Documents”)
• Minitab intro on Friday – more on this on
Wednesday