Ordinary least squares

Geometrically, this is seen as the sum of the squared distances, parallel to the axis of the dependent variable, between each data point in the set and the corresponding point on the regression surface—the smaller the differences, the better the model fits the data. The resulting estimator can be expressed by a simple formula, especially in the case of a simple linear regression, in which there is a single regressor on the right side of the regression equation.

The OLS estimator is consistent for the level-one fixed effects when the regressors are exogenous and forms perfect colinearity (rank condition), consistent for the variance estimate of the residuals when regressors have finite fourth moments and—by the Gauss–Markov theorem—optimal in the class of linear unbiased estimators when the errors are homoscedastic and serially uncorrelated. Under these conditions, the method of OLS provides minimum-variance mean-unbiased estimation when the errors have finite variances. Under the additional assumption that the errors are normally distributed with zero mean, OLS is the maximum likelihood estimator that outperforms any non-linear unbiased estimator.