Chapter 20. Nonlinear Models

A key tenet of linear models is a linear relationship, which is actually reflected in the coefficients, not the predictors. While this is a nice simplifying assumption, in reality nonlinearity often holds. Fortunately, modern computing makes fitting nonlinear models not much more difficult than fitting linear models. Typical implementations are nonlinear least squares, splines, decision trees and random forests and generalized additive models (GAMs).

20.1. Nonlinear Least Squares

The nonlinear least squares model uses squared error loss to find the optimal parameters of a generic (nonlinear) function of the predictors.

A common application for a nonlinear model is using the location of WiFi-connected devices to ...

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