Construct · 4 fields · 5 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningregression to the meancompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to regression is regression to the mean.
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Fitting an equation that describes how an outcome depends on one or more predictors, so the fit can summarise the relationship or predict new cases. The name reached statistics through Francis Galton, who drew a straight line of a son's height on his father's; the estimation machinery is laid out in texts such as Draper and Smith's Applied Regression Analysis. The referent is a mathematical relationship estimated from data, usually by least squares, and the unit is a set of coefficients with their standard errors. This is a technique a researcher chooses and applies, not something that happens in the world, which is what separates it from the phenomenon Galton also described, where extreme scores drift back toward the average.[1]
The tendency for an extreme measurement to be followed, on a second measurement, by one closer to the average, whenever the two are less than perfectly correlated. Galton named it in Regression towards mediocrity in hereditary stature (1886), and Barnett, van der Pols, and Dobson's Regression to the mean: What it is and how to deal with it shows how it fools single-group before-and-after studies. The referent is not a model a researcher fits but a fact about repeated measurement: the unit is the expected shrinkage of an extreme score toward the mean. It shares the word and Galton's 1886 paper with regression analysis, yet one is a chosen method and this is a bias to guard against.[2][3]
A retreat, under stress or frustration, to a mode of thought or behaviour typical of an earlier stage of development. Freud set out the idea in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, where libido that meets an obstacle can fall back along the path it has travelled toward earlier fixations. The referent is a mind, not a dataset: the unit is a person reverting to a younger way of coping, such as an adult sulking or clinging when overwhelmed. It borrows only the meaning of going backward from the statistical uses; there is no measured line and no mean, and the return is inferred clinically rather than computed.[4]
A defect that reappears in software that used to work, so a change breaks behaviour that previously passed. Yoo and Harman's survey Regression testing minimization, selection and prioritization frames the practice built to catch it: rerunning tests after each change to detect functionality that has broken. The referent is a codebase, and the unit is a single reintroduced fault, seen as a test that once passed and now fails. It shares with the psychoanalytic meaning the idea of slipping back to a worse state, but here the state is an artefact's behaviour, checked mechanically, not a person's mind read by a clinician.[5]
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