Allen Nugent (2/9/2010)
Nice work, Mark.
I'll second that - a very nice article indeed.
Of course, there are weird and wonderful techniques for fitting data to nonlinear functions, but it might not be practical to do it with SQL.
Well, if you can do it say in Fortran+Dystal+LAPACK+FSPAK it's probably not too hard in SQL. What sort of package do people generally use for this sort of thing today? I'm way out of date (forgotten nearly all of my stats and most of my curve fitting) so I wouldn't try to do it myself. But if I asked an expert for predictions I would definitely want to know what methods he used, what assumptions he made, and maybe look at the code to check it didn't include the most common idiocies (and SQL is a language I can read, because it was designed for readability rather than to enable maximum obscurity like some pouplar languages).
Tom