Cool.

I guess that's the essence of that two dimensional example that I gave. The difference being that the program does not have to determine which points it takes into account. It just uses all of the data points, and the weighting allows it to do so. That's also its weakness in some ways .. Correct? .. that it considers all data points to an extent no matter how removed they are... or for some other reason?

The fact that it isn't linear isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, is it? Depends on the type of function, I guess. I suppose another aspect that adds to its simplicity is that it doesn't require you to select whether the function is linear, quadratic, logarithmic, etc, before approximating it.

When (if?) I get a chance, I'll generate some graphs using the data set (which I actually don't have yet :-), varying the weighting, to see how the estimation looks visually. Perhaps I'll post a sample of them up here later on.

Thanks!

Zenon Zabinski | zdog | zdog@perlmonk.org