The phrase "a weaker trend" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing patterns or movements in data, research, or observations that are less pronounced or significant than others.
Example: "The analysis revealed a weaker trend in consumer spending compared to previous years."
Alternatives: "a less pronounced trend" or "a diminished trend".
Yet the increase in US imports has flattened out as the country's potential growth rate has dropped, and China's imports are similarly on a weaker trend in line with slowing growth.
If there is any silver lining for Mr. Obama in these data, it may be that polls of registered voters show a weaker trend toward Mr. Romney than polls of likely voters.
c Breaking the experimental control volume into proximal and medial components shows a weaker trend than the total volume.
Four kilobases upstream of rs9624472, the rs2267076 T allele demonstrated a trend of susceptibility to severe malaria [OR = 1.11 (1 1.23), P = 0.051] and, further upstream (8 kb), the rs3761422 T demonstrated a weaker trend of susceptibility to severe malaria [OR = 1.09 (0.99–1.21), P = 0.096].
Defining swimming as head immersion at beach B resulted in a weaker trend than did body immersion or any contact with water, but at this beach only 18% of respondents reported immersing their head.
In conclusion our study showed HRV16 infection is associated with strong trends towards increases in the relative abundances of Haemophilus and Neisseria and a weaker trend towards increases in the relative abundance of Staphylococcus.
The transition period where Facebook may not have been showing any "recently read article" box is likely to blame for the decline, along with a leveling off from the spike and reduced traffic from a weaker "trending articles" design.
Pooled data from all species indicated a weak trend towards elevated PUFAs at lower temperature.
There was a weak trend for regions known to encode T cell epitopes to have slightly higher indices suggesting balancing selection.
TEM particle size analysis also showed a weak trend with decreasing particle size over time, however, the associated standard deviations were quite big and sometimes overlapping.
In both cases a weak trend is observed between performance and training time (R2 0.25 and 0.38 respectively, Additional file 1: Figure S5).
