Show HN: An easy-to-use online curve fitting tool
15 points
by byx
10 days ago
| 4 comments
| byx2000.github.io
| HN
This is a powerful online curve fitting tool that supports fitting dozens of commonly used functions and implicit functions. It features a clean interface and simple operation. If you need to perform curve fitting but don't want to learn professional software like Matlab or Origin, you can try this tool.
okramcivokram
2 hours ago
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It'd be nice if there was some demo data because I might want to play with it to see how it works, but don't have any data to use it on.
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okramcivokram
2 hours ago
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I've now tried it by adding a bunch of random points and I find it very cool! It can make curves fit very snugly. Maybe enhance it by a mode that runs all the models and shows you which one has the least errors/best fit.
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monkeydust
12 minutes ago
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Pretty sure this could replace one of my junior quants!
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iSpiderman
35 minutes ago
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Very nice. I will use this at school to quickly produce fits. File import does not seem to work though...
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cb321
1 hour ago
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The fit diagnostics at the top of the plot are inadequate. This needs at a minimum error estimates on the estimated parameters (probably bootstrap) and ideally some kind of "error envelope" on the plot.
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indeed30
30 minutes ago
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I don’t think you can do anything sensible here without making much stronger modelling assumptions. A vanilla non-parametric bootstrap is only valid under a very specific generative story: IID sampling from a population. Many (most?) curve-fitting problems won't satisfy that.

For example, suppose you measure the decay of a radioactive source at fixed times t = 0,1,2,... and fit y = A e^{-kt}. The only randomness is small measurement error with, say, SD = 0.5. The bootstrap sees the huge spread in the y-values that comes from the deterministic decay curve itself, not from noise. It interprets that structural variation as sampling variability and you end up with absurdly wide bootstrap confidence intervals that have nothing to do with the actual uncertainty in the experiment.

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