What rhymes with polynomial regression?
po·ly·no·mi·al re·gres·sion

In statistics, polynomial regression is a form of regression analysis in which the relationship between the independent variable x and the dependent variable y is modelled as an nth degree polynomial in x. Polynomial regression fits a nonlinear relationship between the value of x and the corresponding conditional mean of y, denoted E(y |x). Although polynomial regression fits a nonlinear model to the data, as a statistical estimation problem it is linear, in the sense that the regression function E(y | x) is linear in the unknown parameters that are estimated from the data. For this reason, polynomial regression is considered to be a special case of multiple linear regression. The explanatory (independent) variables resulting from the polynomial expansion of the "baseline" variables are known as higher-degree terms. Such variables are also used in classification settings.

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