Words that contain UIO, and best-fitting lines

In Calculus I we spend a fair amount of time talking about how nicely the tangent line fits a smooth curve.

Tangent line to exponential function at x=0

But truth be told, it fits only near the point of tangency. How can we find the best approximating line for a function ${f}$ on a given interval?

Best linear fit to the exponential function on [0,1]

A natural measure of quality of approximation is the maximum deviation of the curve from the line, ${E(f;\alpha,\beta) = \max_{[a, b]} |f(x) - \alpha x-\beta|}$ where ${\alpha,\beta}$ are the coefficients in the line equation, to be determined. We need ${\alpha,\beta}$ that minimize ${E(f;\alpha,\beta)}$ .

The Chebyshev equioscillation theorem is quite useful here. For one thing, its name contains the letter combination uio, which Scrabble players may appreciate. (Can you think of other words with this combination?) Also, its statement does not involve concepts outside of Calculus I. Specialized to the case of linear fit, it says that ${\alpha,\beta}$ are optimal if and only if there exist three numbers ${ x_1<x_2<x_3}$ in ${[a, b]}$ such that the deviations ${\delta_i = f(x_i) - \alpha x_i-\beta}$

are equal to ${E(f;\alpha,\beta)}$ in absolute value: ${|\delta_i| = E(f;\alpha,\beta)}$ for ${i=1,2,3}$
have alternating signs: ${\delta_1 = -\delta_2 = \delta_3}$

Let’s consider what this means. First, ${f'(x_i) =\alpha}$ unless ${x_i}$ is an endpoint of ${[a,b]}$ . Since ${x_2}$ cannot be an endpoint, we have ${f'(x_2)=\alpha}$ .

Furthermore, ${f(x) - \alpha x }$ takes the same value at ${x_1}$ and ${x_3}$ . This gives an equation for ${x_2}$

$\displaystyle f(x_1)-f'(x_2)x_1 = f(x_3)-f'(x_2) x_3 \qquad \qquad (1)$

which can be rewritten in the form resembling the Mean Value Theorem:

$\displaystyle f'(x_2) = \frac{f(x_1)-f(x_3)}{x_1-x_3} \qquad \qquad (2)$

If ${f'}$ is strictly monotone, there can be only one ${x_i}$ with ${f'(x_i)=\alpha}$ . Hence ${x_1=a}$ and ${x_3=b}$ in this case, and we find ${x_2}$ by solving (2). This gives ${\alpha = f'(x_2)}$ , and then ${\beta}$ is not hard to find.

Here is how I did this in Sage:

var('x a b')
f = sin(x)  # or another function
df = f.diff(x)
a = # left endpoint
b = # right endpoint

That was the setup. Now the actual computation:

var('x1 x2 x3')
x1 = a
x3 = b
x2 = find_root(f(x=x1)-df(x=x2)*x1 == f(x=x3)-df(x=x2)*x3, a, b)
alpha = df(x=x2)
beta = 1/2*(f(x=x1)-alpha*x1 + f(x=x2)-alpha*x2)
show(plot(f,a,b)+plot(alpha*x+beta,a,b,color='red'))

Fitting a line to the sine curve — Fitting a line to the sine

However, the algorithm fails to properly fit a line to the sine function on ${[0,3\pi/2]}$ :

The problem is, ${f'(x)=\cos x}$ is no longer monotone, making it possible for two of ${x_i}$ to be interior points. Recalling the identities for cosine, we see that these points must be symmetric about ${x=\pi}$ . One of ${x_i}$ must still be an endpoint, so either ${x_1=a}$ (and ${x_3=2\pi-x_2}$ ) or ${x_3=b}$ (and ${x_1=2\pi-x_2}$ ). The first option works:

This same line is also the best fit on the full period ${[0,2\pi]}$ . It passes through ${(\pi,0)}$ and has the slope of ${-0.2172336...}$ which is not a number I can recognize.

On the interval ${[0,4\pi]}$ , all three of the above approaches fail:

Luckily we don’t need a computer in this case. Whenever ${|f|}$ has at least three points of maximum with alternating signs of ${f}$ , the Chebyshev equioscillation theorem implies that the best linear fit is the zero function.

1 thought on “Words that contain UIO, and best-fitting lines”

colindcarroll says:

2014-09-08 at 16:30

Late to the party, but there’s a nice python one-liner (on most unix based systems) for your rhetorical question!

print(“”.join(word for word in open(‘/usr/share/dict/words’) if “uio” in word and word.islower() and word.strip().isalpha()))

Interestingly, my ubuntu installation finds three versions of “obsequious”, while OSX finds 21 words (“stultiloquious”?) Equioscillation isn’t in either list.

Words that contain UIO, and best-fitting lines

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