You are in a statistics course minding your business. The teacher presents you with an equation, y=4+2*age+4*height. You immeditiately recognize the equation as a linear regression model. Yay I know something! Then you see statistical output like this,

Label                    Coefficient           standard deviation    T statistic       Pvalue

Constant                  4                                2.32                         3.33                0.0001

Age                           2                                 1.21                        4.44               0.50

height                     4                                  1.03                        3.24               0.02

And you are asked to indicate which variables are useful for predicting Y. Excuse me? Useful? You might think, it would be useful if I wasn’t required to take this class in the first place. Ha! Okay seriously, the p-value interpretation is the main focus. You are being required to compare the p-value column. If  your P value is less than your level of confidence, it is useful for predicting Y. Statistical significance is another term people use and it means you got something here.

• Moore to follow -Amy