Learning from Data

A common task in statistics, data mining, machine learning, etc. is to find a mathematical function that fits a set of data.

For example: Given temperature, wind speed, humidity, day of the year, etc., predict the strength of a hurricane.

Or: Given n, predict the running time of selection sort:

\epsfig {file=figs15/selectfit.ps,width=3.5in}

This shows the ``best'' linear function (0.001779818n -3.596).


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