Glory be! The ratio! (OoP)

[David <dfrankiswork@netscape.net>]

I wrote:

> > Linear: R2 0.90, B6 1100, B7 1250
> > Quadratic: R2 0.99 B6 1400, B7 1900
> > Exponential: R2 0.94 B6 1300, B7 1700
 
Dumbledad asked

> What does R2, B6, and B7 stand for? I should know but don't (and 
am 
> not near stats books to check)

Much as it grieves me to bring Cindy back to earth among the 
pansies, I'd better try to clarify.

As Ksnidget said, the R2 (read as R-squared - the limitations of 
plain text) number is the measure of goodness of fit of the curve. 
Numbers close to 1 mean the curve fits the data pretty well.

B6 stands for book 6 and B7 for book 7.

The idea of curve fitting is that you plot a graph of the number of 
pages against the number of the book in the series, and then plot a 
straight line or a smooth curve that comes as close as possible to 
the plotted points.  A linear fit means drawing a straight line, 
while quadratic and exponential curves involve more complicated 
formulae to plot them.

So all I was saying was that if you try the linear fit, you get an 
R2 value of 0.9, and reading off the curve for books 6 and 7 gives 
about 1100 and 1250 pages respectively.  And similarly for the other 
curves.
 
> Whilst we're all feeding our inner geek, what I'd like to see is a 
> pictorial analysis of each of the HP novels using a visualization 
> technique like Text Arc http://www.textarc.org/ 

That site looks interesting - though I couldn't figure out what they 
are doing exactly.

> Now all I need is electronic 
> versions of the texts. Ho hum.

I fear that is illegal at the present time.

David