Log-Log Graph, Curve Fit on Matlab - matlab

Im im trying to validate my engineering work using Matlab. I have a series of x and y data that I have plotted on a Log-Log Graph.
The result is a curve.
What I need to do is to apply a curve fit to this graph, and show what the equation of the fit is?
I have tried other answers on here and tried using polyfit and polyval but they aren't really doing what I need but what I lack is the forthwith understanding.
Kind regards

Apply polyfit to logx and logy instead of x and y, and then, to use the fitted result apply polyval to log(x) and use exp() on the result to get the actual fitted y:
logx = log(x);
logy = log(y);
fitp = polyfit(logx, logy, n);
newy = exp(polyval(fitp, log(newx)));

Fitting in the log-space may be undesirable. Most likely you want to show the equation that best fits the data, not a transformation of the data. As a result, I would fit the linear data, then transform it for visualization as necessary. If that's acceptable, polyfit and polyval should work.
If you believe fitting in the log-space is important, I've used lsqcurvefit before, but this requires both the optimization toolbox and some idea of which function you'd like to fit (i.e. is your data best represented by 10^x or x^2?). There's also the curve-fitting toolbox, which might be worth looking into if there are issues you could identify interactively with a GUI but not easily put into words. This provides a 'fit' function that could be useful too.

Related

Higher order polynomial fitting is not so handy surprisingly

I have a simple question but was not able to fix it by myself. I want to use the MATLAB curvefitting toolbox and fit higher order polynomials. It works if I want to fit polynomials of order 1 to 9. But, to my surprise it does not work for polynomials with degree higher than 9. To make it simple, can you just see the following simple code which does not work for me, unfortunately.
l=1:0.01:10;y=l.^10;
[xData, yData] = prepareCurveData(l,y);
ft = fittype( 'poly10' );
[Fit, gof] = fit( xData, yData, ft, 'Normalize', 'on' );
Thanks in advance,
Babak
It might be surprising, but it is documented: List of Library Models for Curve and Surface Fitting. You can always use polyfit, but as per the warning it issues, once you start getting polynomials of that degree, the fit is likely to be problematic anyway.
This answer is some supplement to the Phil Goddard's answer.
There is no poly10 in the function fit. But there are at least two alternative ways to fit any degree of the polynomial: something like polyX, where x could be 1,2,...,M, (if it is necessary).
clc; clear;
%%data
l=1:0.01:10;y=l.^10;
[xData, yData] = prepareCurveData(l,y);
%%High degree polynomial fitting
%set the degree of the polunomial
Degree=10;
%Fit with customize option
%generate the cell array from 'x^Degree' to 'x^0'
syms x
Str=char(power(x,Degree:-1:0));
%set the fitting type & options, then call fit
HighPoly = fittype(strsplit(Str(10:end-3),','));
options = fitoptions('Normalize', 'off','Method','LinearLeastSquares','Robust','off');
[curve,gof] = fit(xData,yData,HighPoly,options)
%Polyfit with the degree of Degree
p = polyfit(xData,yData,Degree)
But both fit and polyfit show some warnings, in my humble opinion, it is due to the Runge's phenomenon, which is a problem of oscillation at the edges of an interval that occurs when using polynomial interpolation with polynomials of high degree over a set of equispaced interpolation points.
Discard the data in this situation or some similar ones, where the true function is polynomial with high degree, says something in the Pn[R], high degree polynomial is not recommended in the fitting of the complex function.
Edit: generalized the code.

Using matlab to obtain the vector fields and the angles made by the vector field on a closed curve?

Here is the given system I want to plot and obtain the vector field and the angles they make with the x axis. I want to find the index of a closed curve.
I know how to do this theoretically by choosing convenient points and see how the vector looks like at that point. Also I can always use
to compute the angles. However I am having trouble trying to code it. Please don't mark me down if the question is unclear. I am asking it the way I understand it. I am new to matlab. Can someone point me in the right direction please?
This is a pretty hard challenge for someone new to matlab, I would recommend taking on some smaller challenges first to get you used to matlab's conventions.
That said, Matlab is all about numerical solutions so, unless you want to go down the symbolic maths route (and in that case I would probably opt for Mathematica instead), your first task is to decide on the limits and granularity of your simulated space, then define them so you can apply your system of equations to it.
There are lots of ways of doing this - some more efficient - but for ease of understanding I propose this:
Define the axes individually first
xpts = -10:0.1:10;
ypts = -10:0.1:10;
tpts = 0:0.01:10;
The a:b:c syntax gives you the lower limit (a), the upper limit (c) and the spacing (b), so you'll get 201 points for the x. You could use the linspace notation if that suits you better, look it up by typing doc linspace into the matlab console.
Now you can create a grid of your coordinate points. You actually end up with three 3d matrices, one holding the x-coords of your space and the others holding the y and t. They look redundant, but it's worth it because you can use matrix operations on them.
[XX, YY, TT] = meshgrid(xpts, ypts, tpts);
From here on you can perform whatever operations you like on those matrices. So to compute x^2.y you could do
x2y = XX.^2 .* YY;
remembering that you'll get a 3d matrix out of it and all the slices in the third dimension (corresponding to t) will be the same.
Some notes
Matlab has a good builtin help system. You can type 'help functionname' to get a quick reminder in the console or 'doc functionname' to open the help browser for details and examples. They really are very good, they'll help enormously.
I used XX and YY because that's just my preference, but I avoid single-letter variable names as a general rule. You don't have to.
Matrix multiplication is the default so if you try to do XX*YY you won't get the answer you expect! To do element-wise multiplication use the .* operator instead. This will do a11 = b11*c11, a12 = b12*c12, ...
To raise each element of the matrix to a given power use .^rather than ^ for similar reasons. Likewise division.
You have to make sure your matrices are the correct size for your operations. To do elementwise operations on matrices they have to be the same size. To do matrix operations they have to follow the matrix rules on sizing, as will the output. You will find the size() function handy for debugging.
Plotting vector fields can be done with quiver. To plot the components separately you have more options: surf, contour and others. Look up the help docs and they will link to similar types. The plot family are mainly about lines so they aren't much help for fields without creative use of the markers, colours and alpha.
To plot the curve, or any other contour, you don't have to test the values of a matrix - it won't work well anyway because of the granularity - you can use the contour plot with specific contour values.
Solving systems of dynamic equations is completely possible, but you will be doing a numeric simulation and your results will again be subject to the granularity of your grid. If you have closed form solutions, like your phi expression, they may be easier to work with conceptually but harder to get working in matlab.
This kind of problem is tractable in matlab but it involves some non-basic uses which are pretty hard to follow until you've got your head round Matlab's syntax. I would advise to start with a 2d grid instead
[XX, YY] = meshgrid(xpts, ypts);
and compute some functions of that like x^2.y or x^2 - y^2. Get used to plotting them using quiver or plotting the coordinates separately in intensity maps or surfaces.

Differentiating a Centred and Scaled Polyfit Fit

I have some data which I wish to model in order to be able to get relatively accurate values in the same range as the data.
To do this I used polyfit to fit a 6th order polynomial and due to my x-axis values it suggested I centred and scaled it to get a more accurate fit which I did.
However, now I want to find the derivative of this function in order to model the velocity of my model.
But I am not sure how the polyder function interacts with the scaled and fitted polyfit which I have produced. (I don't want to use the unscaled model as this is not very accurate).
Here is some code which reproduces my problem. I attempted to rescale the x values before putting them into the fit for the derivative but this still did no fix the problem.
x = 0:100;
y = 2*x.^2 + x + 1;
Fit = polyfit(x,y,2);
[ScaledFit,s,mu] = polyfit(x,y,2);
Deriv = polyder(Fit);
ScaledDeriv = polyder(ScaledFit);
plot(x,polyval(Deriv,x),'b.');
hold on
plot(x,polyval(ScaledDeriv,(x-mu(1))/mu(2)),'r.');
Here I have chosen a simple polynomial so that I could fit it accurate and produce the actual derivative.
Any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.
I am using Matlab R2014a BTW.
Edit.
Just been playing about with it and by dividing the resulting points for the differential by the standard deviation mu(2) it gave a very close result within the range -3e-13 to about 5e-13.
polyval(ScaledDeriv,(x-mu(1))/mu(2))/mu(2);
Not sure quite why this is the case, is there another more elegant way to solve this?
Edit2. Sorry for another edit but again was mucking around and found that for a large sample x = 1:1000; the deviation became much bigger up to 10. I am not sure if this is due to a bad polyfit even though it is centred and scaled or due to the funny way the derivative is plotted.
Thanks for your time
A simple application of the chain rule gives
Since by definition
it follows that
Which is exactly what you have verified numerically.
The lack of accuracy for large samples is due to the global, rather then local, Lagrange polynomial interpolation which you have done. I would suggest that you try to fit your data with splines, and obtain the derivative with fnder(). Another option is to apply the polyfit() function locally, i.e. to a moving small set of points, and then apply polyder() to all the fitted polynomials.

Estimating the error when fitting a curve with DCT and polyfit

I have a matlab script that performs curve fitting on a set of curves using polynomials of third, second and first order (using polyfit with the desired order) and also using DCT of 4,3 and 2 coefficients (invoking dct for the whole array and then truncating just the first 4,3 or 2 coeffs).
I'm able to get a graphical view of the accuracy of each curve fitting using polyval and idct for the 2 types of curve fitting, but I was wondering if there is any way of getting a numeric value of the accuracy that makes sense for both approaches (dct and polyfit).
I'm sure this is more a maths question rather than a Matlab question, but maybe there is some way to obtain a simple and elegant way in a array-based algorithm that I haven't thought of yet.
Thanks in advance for your comments!
EDIT: What about correlation? :D
In the cuve fitting tool there should be a residual that uses standard deviation. If you are interested in another way to do it maybe you should use rmse for the entire curve, scripting a function that does something like:
input args : y1 = (curve going to be fitted), y2 = (fitted curve)
For each value in y, sum up the difference y1-y2 squared
Divide with the number of entries
Provided you are now left with a number, return its square root
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-mean-square_deviation#Formula for more.

matlab interpolation

Starting from the plot of one curve, it is possible to obtain the parametric equation of that curve?
In particular, say x={1 2 3 4 5 6....} the x axis, and y = {a b c d e f....} the corresponding y axis. I have the plot(x,y).
Now, how i can obtain the equation that describe the plotted curve? it is possible to display the parametric equation starting from the spline interpolation?
Thank you
If you want to display a polynomial fit function alongside your graph, the following example should help:
x=-3:.1:3;
y=4*x.^3-5*x.^2-7.*x+2+10*rand(1,61);
p=polyfit(x,y,3); %# third order polynomial fit, p=[a,b,c,d] of ax^3+bx^2+cx+d
yfit=polyval(p,x); %# evaluate the curve fit over x
plot(x,y,'.')
hold on
plot(x,yfit,'-g')
equation=sprintf('y=%2.2gx^3+%2.2gx^2+%2.2gx+%2.2g',p); %# format string for equation
equation=strrep(equation,'+-','-'); %# replace any redundant signs
text(-1,-80,equation) %# place equation string on graph
legend('Data','Fit','Location','northwest')
Last year, I wrote up a set of three blogs for Loren, on the topic of modeling/interpolationg a curve. They may cover some of your questions, although I never did find the time to add another 3 blogs to finish the topic to my satisfaction. Perhaps one day I will get that done.
The problem is to recognize there are infinitely many curves that will interpolate a set of data points. A spline is a nice choice, because it can be made well behaved. However, that spline has no simple "equation" to write down. Instead, it has many polynomial segments, pieced together to be well behaved.
You're asking for the function/mapping between two data sets. Knowing the physics involved, the function can be derived by modeling the system. Write down the differential equations and solve it.
Left alone with just two data series, an input and an output with a 'black box' in between you may approximate the series with an arbitrary function. You may start with a polynomial function
y = a*x^2 + b*x + c
Given your input vector x and your output vector y, parameters a,b,c must be determined applying a fitness function.
There is an example of Polynomial Curve Fitting in the MathWorks documentation.
Curve Fitting Tool provides a flexible graphical user interfacewhere you can interactively fit curves and surfaces to data and viewplots. You can:
Create, plot, and compare multiple fits
Use linear or nonlinear regression, interpolation,local smoothing regression, or custom equations
View goodness-of-fit statistics, display confidenceintervals and residuals, remove outliers and assess fits with validationdata
Automatically generate code for fitting and plottingsurfaces, or export fits to workspace for further analysis