Polynomial Fit

This week in my mathematics course, Paul tasked us with taking a discrete data set and writing a method that would map a polynomial equation to the data points. Here what I submitted.

Notice that the two end points of the the polynomial dip in a direction inconsistent with the data. This demonstrates that generating a polynomial is not the most accuracy way of predicting data. Other methods, like Fourier analysis or a principal component analysis, provide a more accurate algorithm but are considerably more difficult to implement (or as Paul would say, is no trivial matter).

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