# Methods to find the relationships between independent and dependent variables instead of regression

Which statistical method can be used to find the relationships between independent and dependent variables instead of regression? And their advantages over regression. It should be mentioned I am not able to do regression due to less number of observations that I have 5 independent variables 3 categorical and two continuous.

• re: "I am not able to do regression due to less number of observations that I have 5 independent variables": does this mean you have more predictors than you have samples? So, your sample size is less than $5$? – Macro Jun 2 '12 at 15:45
• @macro: my observation is 21 and my variables are 5.my complete question is my previous question stats.stackexchange.com/questions/29612/… – rose Jun 3 '12 at 2:37

In that case, the best approach is to do a linear model with the 5 variables. If you know R, you put them in a data.frame that you call data, the "independent" variable in the first column and the other ones after, the individual observation in each line and you do:
anova(lm(data))