least squares

English Thesaurus

1. a method of fitting a curve to data points so as to minimize the sum of the squares of the distances of the points from the curve (noun.cognition)

hypernym	:	statistical method, statistical procedure,
definition	:	a method of analyzing or representing statistical data; a procedure for calculating a statistic (noun.cognition)

domain category	:	statistics,
definition	:	a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection and interpretation of quantitative data and the use of probability theory to estimate population parameters (noun.cognition)