If you know statistics, you probably have heard of linear regression before. Least squares is a method for performing linear regression. You can think of linear regression as the task of fitting a straight line through a set of points. There are multiple possible strategies to do this, and “ordinary least squares” strategy go like this — You can draw a line, and then for each of the data points, measure the vertical distance between the point and the line, and add these up; the fitted line would be the one where this sum of distances is as small as possible.