Seriously. I will need it for work. I haven’t been able to understand that shit from any online resource until now. Please ELI5
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R^2 is not a very useful metric for many reasons. First, it is not a test of any hypothesis. You may, arbitrarily, create experiments where R^2 is very, very low, but a clear relationship exists. Likewise, you can find setups where R^2 is very high, but there is no relationship whatever. You will receive many responses that will claim the R^2 provides a measure of “goodness of fit” or, worse, that R^2 tells you the “explanatory power” of your model. This is all metastatistical nonsense, snake oil, plain bs.
R^2, also, tells us very little (and can even mislead) about nonlinear relationships. And this is hardly an exhaustive list of the problems that defenders of the R^2 should grapple with.
There are many useful tools for regression, but R^2 isn’t one of them. I encourage you to read many viewpoints on the matter, those for and against, and then decide if you really believe in the R^2 biz.
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