regression

UK/ɹɪˈɡɹɛʃ.ən/US/ɹiːˈɡɹɛʃ.ən/

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,786 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: regressions

Regression is a slipping back to an earlier and worse state. Regression of the disease, behavioural regression, regression to childhood.

In children under stress it is common and temporary: a toilet-trained child may wet the bed again after a shock. In statistics, regression is a way of fitting a line to data, and it was named from the discovery that extremes tend to be followed by less extreme values.

Definitions of regression

1nounregressionA slipping back to an earlier and worse state.C1
“Doctors were worried by the regression in his speech after the second stroke.”

regression is a going back.

Where it comes from

Latin regressio means a going back, from regredi — re, back, plus gradi, to step.

Latin
regressio
English, today
regression

Latin regressio. Equivalent to regress + ion. The statistics sense comes from regression to the mean.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

regression in the wild

Regression testing (rarely, non-regression testing) is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs as expected after a change.
Regression testing
If not, that would be called a regression.
Regression testing
In the first case, the "regression" effect is statistically likely to occur, but in the second case, it may occur less strongly or not at all.
Regression toward the mean
If the multiple categories are ordered, one can use the ordinal logistic regression (for example the proportional odds ordinal logistic model).
Logistic regression
First, regression analysis is widely used for prediction and forecasting, where its use has substantial overlap with the field of machine learning.
Regression analysis

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

← Vocabulary