Forecasting movie revenues with Twitter. A study presented at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology investigated whether the volume of chatter on Twitter.com could be used to forecast the box office revenues of movies. For each in a sample of 24 recent movies, opening weekend box office revenue (in millions of dollars) was measured as well as the movie’s tweet rate (the average number of tweets referring to the movie one week prior to the movie’s release).

a. In this study, identify the dependent and independent variables.

b. Explain why a probabilistic model is more appropriate than a deterministic model.

c. Write the equation of the straight-line, probabilistic model.