[Offtopic] Line fitting [was Re: Numpy outlier removal]

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 8 January 2013 01:23, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:32:54 +0000, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>
> [...]
>> I also think it would
>> be highly foolish to go so far with refusing to eyeball data that you
>> would accept the output of some regression algorithm even when it
>> clearly looks wrong.
>
> I never said anything of the sort.
>
> I said, don't fit lines to data by eye. I didn't say not to sanity check
> your straight line fit is reasonable by eyeballing it.

I should have been a little clearer. That was the situation when I
decided to just use a (digital) ruler - although really it was more of
a visual bisection (1, 2, 1.5, 1.25...). The regression result was
clearly wrong (and also invalid for the reasons Terry has described).
Some of the problems were easily fixable and others were not. I could
have spent an hour getting the code to make the line go where I wanted
it to, or I could just fit the line visually in about 2 minutes.


Oscar