Question

Google is not being my friend – it’s been a long time since my stats class in college…I need to calculate the start and end points for a trendline on a graph – is there an easy way to do this? (working in C# but whatever language works for you)

Answer 1

Given that the trendline is straight, find the slope by choosing any two points and calculating:

(A) slope = (y1-y2)/(x1-x2)

Then you need to find the offset for the line. The line is specified by the equation:

(B) y = offset + slope*x

So you need to solve for offset. Pick any point on the line, and solve for offset:

(C) offset = y – (slope*x)

Now you can plug slope and offset into the line equation (B) and have the equation that defines your line. If your line has noise you’ll have to decide on an averaging algorithm, or use curve fitting of some sort.

If your line isn’t straight then you’ll need to look into Curve fitting, or Least Squares Fitting – non trivial, but do-able. You’ll see the various types of curve fitting at the bottom of the least squares fitting webpage (exponential, polynomial, etc) if you know what kind of fit you’d like.

Also, if this is a one-off, use Excel.