Question

Unnecessary outliers would generally fall _____.

A) Outside the confidence interval
B) Inside the confidence interval
C) On the regression line
D) In the center of the distribution

Answer 1

Unnecessary outliers generally fall outside the confidence interval.

Step-by-step explanation:

An outlier is an observed value that is far from the least squares regression line. If a data point is located farther than two standard deviations above or below the best-fit line, it would be considered an outlier.

For example, if we measure the vertical distance from any data point to the corresponding point on the line of best fit and that distance is at least 2s, then we would consider the data point to be too far from the line of best fit, making it an outlier.

Therefore, unnecessary outliers would generally fall outside the confidence interval, since they are observations that do not fit the general pattern of the data.