Chengwei LEI, Ph.D.    Associate Professor

Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
California State University, Bakersfield

 

Data Science

 

Polynomial  Regression

 


 

Polynomial regression is a form of regression analysis in which the relationship between the independent variable x and the dependent variable y is modeled as an nth degree polynomial in x.
Polynomial regression fits a nonlinear relationship between the value of x and the corresponding conditional mean of y, denoted E(y |x).

Although polynomial regression fits a nonlinear model to the data, as a statistical estimation problem it is linear, in the sense that the regression function E(y|x) is linear in the unknown parameters that are estimated from the data. For this reason, polynomial regression is considered to be a special case of multiple linear regression.

 

We can model the expected value of y as an nth degree polynomial, yielding the general polynomial regression model

Polynomial regression models are usually fit using the method of least squares. The least-squares method minimizes the variance of the unbiased estimators of the coefficients.

 


Although it can model non-linear relationships between variables, polynomial regression is considered a type of linear regression because the model itself is linear in its parameters, meaning the coefficients are linear even when the polynomial degree is high; therefore, it is technically classified as "linear" in the statistical sense.

 




Here is one day's temperature data of our campus.

Please try to fit a polynomial regression function to best estimate the temperature.

 

What is the SSE of your model?