I ' m imagining Your first IV as being your first Pokemon that has more than 0 for all IVs <| sep |> Holy fuck . Those arms are buff . <| sep |> Since the nature of this data is noicy there are some deviations and bumbs in the data that have nothing to do with the big picture , the actual trend . So its just best to find the most probable trend that is independent of these pertubations in the data . That is to say , a smooth , continuous curve . What I ' m saying is that this graph implies that the there are these strange quantized bumps in the electoral vote gdpdependance , and that they happen just because the name of state changes . However those are caused by independent second , third , and so on order effects . In other words the relative change between two consecutive points is meaningless , whereas the change compared to all the points , measured or not , is what we are interested in .