 For this reason, given the important property that the error mean is independent of the independent variables, the distribution of the error term is not an important issue in regression analysis.Specifically, it is not typically important whether the error term follows a normal distribution.In a least squares calculation with unit weights, or in linear regression, the variance on the "j"th parameter,
denoted formula_52, is usually estimated with

where the true error variance "σ"2 is replaced by an estimate based on the minimized value of the sum of squares objective function "S".