Question

1. In general, how can someone discern the difference between a response variable and an explanatory variable?

Answer 1

One very basic way to differentiate between response variable and explanatory variable is that response variable will always depend on explanatory variable.

i.e., explanatory variable is an independent variable and response variable is dependent variable(which depend on explanatory variable)

for example- If we are fitting a model of scores of students based on the no of hours of study of respective students

then it is quite easy to see that scores of a students depends directly on the number of hours he/she study

so here scores are dependent variable

and number of hours of study is independent variable.