Before we proceed, and to link with our discussions of Bayesian statistics to come, it is useful the derive the standard regression analysis equations using a statistical interpretation. This allows us also to derive quantities like the variance and other expectation values in a rather straightforward way.
It is assumed that \( \varepsilon_i \sim \mathcal{N}(0, \sigma^2) \) and the \( \varepsilon_{i} \) are independent, i.e.: $$ \begin{align*} \mbox{Cov}(\varepsilon_{i_1}, \varepsilon_{i_2}) & = \left\{ \begin{array}{lcc} \sigma^2 & \mbox{if} & i_1 = i_2, \\ 0 & \mbox{if} & i_1 \not= i_2. \end{array} \right. \end{align*} $$ The randomness of \( \varepsilon_i \) implies that \( \mathbf{Y}_i \) is also a random variable. In particular, \( \mathbf{Y}_i \) is normally distributed, because \( \varepsilon_i \sim \mathcal{N}(0, \sigma^2) \) and \( \mathbf{X}_{i,\ast} \, \beta \) is a non-random scalar. To specify the parameters of the distribution of \( \mathbf{Y}_i \) we need to calculate its first two moments.