Genesee Fishing Tours $($GFT$)$ offers small group fishing expeditions off the local coast. The managers of the company are considering expanding the business to another city and want to put together a financial plan. As a part of that effort, the financial staff are analyzing the operating costs of GFT$.$ They believe that a good predictor of operating cost is the number of clients that use the service. As a part of their analysis, they have collected $30$ months of data on operating costs and number of clients, which follow:

Month Clients Operating Costs

$1475$ $ $39,020$

$275842,960$

$362541,980$

$454338,670$

$566542,030$

$645336,020$

$740834,570$

$873040,480$

$984842,180$

$1058239,410$

$1173144,390$

$1266940,150$

$1368241,930$

$1456539,850$

$1547039,060$

$1638836,200$

$1758250,810$

$1863055,940$

$1950144,330$

$2053548,740$

$2149345,760$

$2249844,850$

$2360153,660$

$2461953,990$

$2579665,660$

$2666659,000$

$2762954,630$

$2854448,230$

$2952646,460$

$3056451,760$

Required:

Estimate the operating costs assuming $700$ clients for the month using the results of a simple regression based on the $30$ months of available data.

What percentage of the variance in the data does the R$-$squared value explain?

You learn that starting in month $16,$ Genesee Fishing Tours started using a different, more personalized protocol for interacting with clients. Estimate the operating cost assuming $700$ clients using the results of a simple regression based on the data for months $16$ through $30$ only.

How confident are you in the estimate using the regression results?