The regression residual vector is , where is the hat matrix. Both and are symmetric idempotent matrices, and . Therefore and the linear image of a multivariate normal vector gives
This multivariate normal distribution is singular, with rank : fitted-residual orthogonality forces . Specifically, and for distinct observations. Thus regression residuals are generally neither independent nor identically distributed, even though the model errors are. Also and is independent of , which justifies the standard errors and exact Student t-tests below.
For any , the linearity from part (a) gives
almost surely, and the right side has a normal distribution. This is the defining linear-combination criterion for a multivariate normal distribution; singular covariance matrices are allowed.
Passing to the limit in the inner products of the partial sums gives
The passage to the limit is justified by Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and convergence. Equivalently, the vector's characteristic function is
Thus both joint normality and the complete covariance matrix follow from the Hilbert-space inner product.
The ordinary least squares estimator is . Consequently the fitted values and regression residuals are
An affine transformation of a multivariate normal distribution is again multivariate normal, possibly with a singular covariance matrix. For a random vector with covariance matrix , its transformed covariance matrix is . Since , and , these results give
Both multivariate normal distributions are supported on their respective projected subspaces. In particular, has variance and has variance ; the regression residuals need not be mutually independent.