
Matlab® provides a bunch of curve fitting commands to make curve fitting from given or defined data.

To see the characteristics of a bunch of data, curve fitting can be very useful. In general, data are obtained from the system separately. And also in engineering and data analysis, curve fitting can be a very important tool. This will avoid the "-0.0000" issue.Curve fitting is a very fundamental thing in numerical analysis. Pointer: It may be necessary to change the format of the output to 'long' rather than 'short'. >coefficients=polyfit(x,y,5) a fifth order attempt >newy=polyval(coefficients,x) fifth degree curve >plot(x,y,'*',x,newy,':') plot the old data and the new fifth order curve This line looks like a good model for the data but it could be even better if we had used a higher order fit. Which should be exactly what you got before. The red dots are the original data (the first two lines of the code in the example) and the dashed line was found using polyfit and polyval. So, the above code finds a first degree (straight) line to fit a set of data points. >x = the independent data set - force >y = the dependent data set - deflection >plot(x,y) make a dot plot >coefficents = polyfit(x,y,1) finds coefficients for a first degree line >Y = polyval(coefficients, x) use coefficients from above to estimate a new set of y values >plot(x,y,'*',x,Y,':') plot the original data with * and the estimated line with. So, Polyval generates a curve to fit the data based on the coefficients found using polyfit. Polyval evaluates a polynomial for a given set of x values. Polyfit generates the coefficients of the polynomial, which can be used to model a curve to fit the data. Polyfit is a Matlab function that computes a least squares polynomial for a given set of data. This equation is a second degree equation because the highest exponent on the "x" is equal to 2.

What is the degree of the following equation? The reason the degree is equal to one is that the "x" in the equation is raised to the power of one (it has an exponent of one). Thus a straight line is a first degree polynomial equation. You can see that if f(x) was called y and a0 was called "m" and a1 was called "b" that we would have the familiar equation for a straight line: If you had a straight line, then n=1, and the equation would be: Here, the coefficients are the a0, a1, and so on. Matlab has two functions, polyfit and polyval, which can quickly and easily fit a set of data points with a polynomial.
