Start with the definition of the sum of squared errors:
To find the value of b that minimizes this, we take the derivative and set the result to 0:
Noting that b has no dependence on i, the sum on the right reduces to n*b and we have:
That last equation is the mean of y. I thought this was kind of cool even though it's really obvious when doing the math.
I noted at the beginning that I noticed this at work. Specifically, it was doing a linear fit where the slope ended up being very close zero. If we take the derivation of that (copied from wikipedia):
and the slope ends up being zero, you get the same equations I walked through above. A simple plot showing it with numbers:
The best fit runs straight through the mean. Neat.
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