Function fitting
In many areas of science, you want to fit a function to data. This function can represent either an empirical or a theoretical model. There are many reasons to do this, for example, if the theoretical model agrees with the observed data values, the theory is likely to be right and hopefully you have gained new insight into the phenomenon you are studying.
In this section, we will discuss some of Octave's fitting functionality. I will not go into details with the algorithms that are behind the fitting functions—this will simply take up too much space and not be of much relevance for the points.
Polynomial fitting
Suppose we want to investigate the length of the leaves in two different families of trees at different heights. Normally the leaves are largest near the ground, in order to increase the photosynthesis. The figure below shows fabricated data of the leaf length as a function of height from the ground for two imaginary families of trees called tree A (red squares) and...
