The use of three mathematical programming techniques (quadratic programming, integer quadratic programming and linear programming) is discussed to solve some problems in linear regression analysis. When the criterion is the minimization of the sum of squared deviations and the parameters are linearly constrained, the problem may be formulated as quadratic programming problem. For the selection of variables to find "best" regression equation in statistics, the technique of integer quadratic programming is proposed and found to be a very useful tool. When the criterion of fitting a linear regression is the minimization of the sum of absolute deviations from the regression function, the problem may be reduced to a linear programming problem and can be solved reasonably well.ably well.