[Maxima] [OT] What field (if any) of math am I looking for?

[Dan Hatton]

On Mon, 26 May 2008, Richard Owlett wrote:

> In an engineering group, there was a question of comparing the "shape"
> of plots of observed data. The discussion got tangled in "where did data
> come from" rather than whether or not one short sequence (tens of
> points) in some sense had the same "shape" as another sequence.
>
> I attempted to recast the problem
>
> Given pairings of datasets ( ALPHA  BETA ), ( BETA GAMMA) etc
> is there a measure ( OMEGA(x,y) ) such that
>
> OMEGA(ALPHA(i), ALPHA(j)) always greater than OMEGA(ALPHA(i), BETA(k))

Substitute "always" for "with some probability that we can estimate",
and you might be looking for "classifiers" or "model comparison".  In
which case, there's some relevant material in

D. J. C. MacKay.  Information theory, inference, and learning
algorithms.  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Sep. 2003.  URL:
<http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf>.

Pulling this back on topic, a quick scan of the Maxima manual suggests
the lsquares and stats packages are relevant.

-- 

HTH,

Dan Hatton

<http://www.bib.hatton.btinternet.co.uk/dan/>