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Practical handbook of curve fitting. (English) Zbl 0855.62001

Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press (ISBN 978-0-8493-0143-8/hbk; 978-0-367-57980-7/pbk; 978-1-003-41822-1/ebook). 249 p. (1994).
This handbook is a reference work demonstrating how to analyse World data bases and to graph and map the results. Default settings in software packages can produce attractive graphs of data imported into the software. Often, the default graph has no equation associated with it and therefore cannot be used as a tool for further analysis or projection of the data. The same software can often be used to generate curves from equations. The reader is shown directly, and in a series of steps, how to fit curves to data using Lotus 1-2-3.
There are traditional unbounded curve fitting techniques – lines of least squares, exponential curves, logistic curves, and Gompertz curves. There is the bounded curve fitting technique of cubic spline interpolation. Beyond these, there is a detailed application of Feigenbaum’s graphical analysis from chaos theory and there is a hint to how fractal geometry might come into play.
Curve fitting algorithms are used in numerous worked examples drawn from electronic data bases of public domain information from the Stars data base of the World Bank and from the WRD data base of the World Resources Institute. The group of the five editors has combined experience of well over 100 years in various disciplines and activities related to curve fitting, including an extensive list of publications and lectures at the professional level.

MSC:

62-00 General reference works (handbooks, dictionaries, bibliographies, etc.) pertaining to statistics
62Pxx Applications of statistics
00B15 Collections of articles of miscellaneous specific interest
62-07 Data analysis (statistics) (MSC2010)
62-04 Software, source code, etc. for problems pertaining to statistics
62A09 Graphical methods in statistics

Software:

Lotus 1-2-3
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Full Text: DOI