High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In applied statistics, a partial residual plot is a graphical technique that attempts to show the relationship between a given independent variable and the response variable given that other independent variables are also in the model. When performing a linear regression with a single independent variable, a scatter plot of the response variable against the independent variable provides a good indication of the nature of the relationship. If there is more than one independent variable, things become more complicated. Although it can still be useful to generate scatter plots of the response variable against each of the independent variables, this does not take into account the effect of the other independent variables in the model.