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The method used to calculated the best straight line through a set of data is called linear regression. It is also called the least squares method. I've included two links. I know the wikipedia link is a bit complicated. The slope and intercept are calculated based on "minimum least squares." If I draw a line through the set if points, for every x value in the data set I will have a y value and a predicted y value (y-hat) based on the straight line. The error (E) is this case is the predicted y minus the actual y. Linear regression finds the slope and intercept of the equation that minimizes the sum of the square of the errors. Mathematically this is stated as: Min z = sum (yi - y-hat)^2 To hand calculate a linear regression line wold take some time. The second link that I've included shows how to calculated this using excel.
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