An Iterative Approach to the Fitting of Trend Surfaces

Abstract

The method described in this paper is a further development and considerable improvement on that described in a previous Computer Contribution (Cole, Jordan, and Merriam, 1967). The basic problem is the same as described in that publication, namely the problem of fitting a surface to a scattered data set of xyz-coordinates and plotting the corresponding contour lines using a digital plotter. The contouring technique finally is the same as described in the above publication and the reader is referred to that paper for details. Other approaches to the general problem are listed in the references at the end of this paper. The method employed in this paper has been described by Cole (1968).