On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 8:37 PM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:

There are actually seven versions of polynomial fit, two for the usual polynomial basis, and one each for Legendre, Chebyshev, Hermite, Hermite_e, and Laguerre ;)

Correct me if I am wrong, but the fitted function is the same regardless of the polynomial basis used. I don't know if there can be numerical stability issues, but chebfit(x, y, n) returns the same as poly2cheb(polyfit(x, y, n)).

In any case, with all the already existing support for these special polynomials, it wouldn't be too hard to set the problem up to calculate the right coefficients directly for each case.

How do you propose to implement it? I think Lagrange multipliers is overkill, I'd rather see using the weights (approximate) or change of variable -- a permutation in this case -- followed by qr and lstsq.

The weights method is already in place, but I find it rather inelegant and unsatisfactory as a solution to this problem. But if it is deemed sufficient, then there is of course no need to go any further.

I hadn't thought of any other way than using Lagrange multipliers, but looking at it in more detail, I am not sure it will be possible to formulate it in a manner that can be fed to lstsq, as polyfit does today. And if it can't, it probably wouldn't make much sense to have two different methods which cannot produce the same full output running under the same hood.

I can't figure out your "change of variable" method from the succinct description, could you elaborate a little more?

Jaime

--
(\__/)
( O.o)
( > <) Este es Conejo. Copia a Conejo en tu firma y ayúdale en sus planes de dominación mundial.