Fitting recommendations

Recommendations and comments on fitting data.

In many cases, to analyze the data recorded during experiments you will need to fit and plot your data.
There are large number of good fitting programs available.

MICROSOFT Excel is acceptable but lacks flexiblity.
Two powerful free programs that work well are "gnuplot" and "paw". Either can be downloaded from the WEB.
("PAW" and its modern incarnation "ROOT" are extremely powerful but may take time to learn.)

It is extremely important to plot the data with error bars of the correct size,
which reflect the statistical and systematic uncertainties in the measurements.

  • Discussion of GNUPLOT functions and fitting

  • a simple GNUPLOT fit example
  • GNUPLOT home page (much more detailed information and downloads)

    Last modified: 20 May 2009

    Tom Browder / teb#phys.hawaii.edu