A variety of methods are used in

econometrics Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics", '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. 8 ...

to estimate

models A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided int ...

consisting of a single

equation In mathematics, an equation is a mathematical formula that expresses the equality of two expressions, by connecting them with the equals sign . The word ''equation'' and its cognates in other languages may have subtly different meanings; for ...

. The oldest and still the most commonly used is the

ordinary least squares In statistics, ordinary least squares (OLS) is a type of linear least squares method for choosing the unknown parameters in a linear regression In statistics, linear regression is a statistical model, model that estimates the relationship ...

method used to estimate

linear regression In statistics, linear regression is a statistical model, model that estimates the relationship between a Scalar (mathematics), scalar response (dependent variable) and one or more explanatory variables (regressor or independent variable). A mode ...

s. A variety of methods are available to estimate

non-linear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system (or a non-linear system) is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathe ...

models. A particularly important class of non-linear models are those used to estimate relationships where the

dependent variable A variable is considered dependent if it depends on (or is hypothesized to depend on) an independent variable. Dependent variables are studied under the supposition or demand that they depend, by some law or rule (e.g., by a mathematical functio ...

is discrete, truncated or censored. These include

logit In statistics, the logit ( ) function is the quantile function associated with the standard logistic distribution. It has many uses in data analysis and machine learning, especially in Data transformation (statistics), data transformations. Ma ...

probit In probability theory and statistics, the probit function is the quantile function associated with the standard normal distribution. It has applications in data analysis and machine learning, in particular exploratory statistical graphics and ...

and Tobit models. Single equation methods may be applied to

time-series In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. E ...

, cross section or panel data.

External links

* Mathematical and quantitative methods (economics) {{econometrics-stub