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Suppose your dataset consists of the following points.

(1,5)

(2,3)

(3,10)

(4,4)

Clearly there's really not a linear relationship between the first coordinate and the second coordinate. In other words, if you plot these four points and try to approximate them with a single line in the plane, you just can't do a very good job.

The person's manager suggested sorting the second coordinates in this list while keeping the first coordinates fixed, resulting in the following:

(1,3)

(2,4)

(3,5)

(4,10)

These points are still not collinear, but they certainly can be better approximated by a line than before. The problem is that this is simply a completely different set of points, so a linear approximation here implies nothing about the original dataset.




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