As someone unfamiliar with statistics, recently through this post i was somewhat shocked to learn that r-squared value is not a suitable metric for nonlinear models and began to wonder what's proper for รขโ‚ฌยฆ Coefficient of determination in statistics, the coefficient of determination, denoted r2 or r2 and pronounced r squared, is the proportion of the variation in the dependent variable that is รขโ‚ฌยฆ Unlike most other scores, r 2 score may be negative (it need not actually be the square of a quantity r).