Over the past year, Desmos has made major improvements to the robustness of regressions (i.e., fitting models to data) in the graphing calculator, particularly for trigonometric, exponential, and logistic models. This post will outline some of the challenges of solving regression problems and some strategies we have used to overcome those challenges.
When you read an expression, like 1/2+3.4, you can immediately understand some of its meaning. You recognize that there are three numbers, and that the numbers are combined with operators. You may also recall that division has higher precedence than addition, so you would divide 1/2 before adding +3.4 when evaluating the expression.
Early last week, Desmos released a change to the way that basic arithmetic is evaluated in our calculators. The goal of this change is to make the calculators’ answers match people’s intuitions more often by computing numerical answers exactly instead of approximately in more cases where a human would.
