by Manolo Romero Escobar
General Linear Model (GLM) is a tool used to understand and analyse linear relationships among variables. It is an umbrella term for many techniques that are taught in most statistics courses: ANOVA, multiple regression, etc.
In its simplest form it describes the relationship between two variables, “y” (dependent variable, outcome, and so on) and “x” (independent variable, predictor, etc). These variables could be both categorical (how many?), both continuous (how much?) or one of each.
Moreover, there can be more than one variable on each side of the relationship. One convention is to use capital letters to refer to multiple variables. Thus Y would mean multiple dependent variables and X would mean multiple independent variables. The most known equation that represents a GLM is: (more…)