How to Use Absolute-Error-Minimizing Software to Minimize Relative Error: Practitioner's Guide

Authors

Afshin Gholamy, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

7-2017

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-17-73

Published in International Mathematical Forum, 2017, Vol. 12, No. 16, pp. 763-770.

Abstract

In many engineering and scientific problems, there is a need to find the parameters of a dependence from the experimental data. There exist several software packages that find the values for these parameters -- values for which the mean square value of the absolute approximation error is the smallest. In practice, however, we are often interested in minimizing the mean square value of the relative approximation error. In this paper, we show how we can use the absolute-error-minimizing software to minimize the relative error.