We have just made a bunch of assumptions about what is ‘really going on’ between y and x, but we’d like to put
numbers on the parameters βo and β1. Well, suppose we’re able to gather a sample of data on x and y. The task
of estimation is then to come up with coefficients—numbers that we can calculate from the data, call them βˆ
0 and
βˆ
1—which serve as estimates of the unknown parameters.