About LinearFit

LinearFit is a generalised least-squares fitter. It has many options to control its behavior, so that the program can do the sensible thing for simple fits to lines, curves, etc. while allowing the advanced user great flexibility. So far as we know, it is the only fitter that offers all of the following features:

• Allows for errors in one or both coordinates of the data.
• Does statistical re-weighting when the data have no explicit errors.
• Calculates estimated errors in the fit parameters.
• Displays the data including error bars if any and the fit results on a single plot.
• Displays the residuals of the fit.

It was written in the Mathematica programming language in 1995 by David M. Harrison and is part of the Experimental Data Analyst package which is marketted by Wolfram Research Inc., the inventors of Mathematica.

The interface to the program uses the J/Link toolkit, which allows a Java program to communicate with Mathematica via MathLink protocols. The same set of Java programs communicates with the user's browser with straight HTML and JavaScript. J/Link was written by Todd Gayley, Director of Java Technology, Wolfram Research Inc.

The interface to the program was written by and is Copyright © 1999, 2000 Solomon R.C. Douglas and David M. Harrison.