Case Study: Curve Fitting :: Data Analysis and Statistics (Mathematics)

Mathematics

Case Study: Curve Fitting

This section provides an overview of some of the MATLAB basic data analysis capabilities in the form of a case study. The examples that follow work with a collection of census data, using MATLAB functions to experiment with fitting curves to the data:

Polynomial fit
Analyzing residuals
Exponential fit
Error bounds

This section also tells you how to use the Basic Fitting interface to perform curve fitting tasks.

Loading the Data

The file census.mat contains U.S. population data for the years 1790 through 1990. Load it into MATLAB:

```
load census
```

Your workspace now contains two new variables, cdate and pop:

cdate is a column vector containing the years from 1790 to 1990 in increments of 10.
pop is a column vector with the U.S. population figures that correspond to the years in cdate.

Multiple Regression Polynomial Fit