Solving a linear equation

Question

I need to programmatically solve a system of linear equations in C, Objective C, or (if needed) C++.

Here\'s an example of the equations:

-44.3940 =          


        

Answer 1

From the wording of your question, it seems like you have more equations than unknowns and you want to minimize the inconsistencies. This is typically done with linear regression, which minimizes the sum of the squares of the inconsistencies. Depending on the size of the data, you can do this in a spreadsheet or in a statistical package. R is a high-quality, free package that does linear regression, among a lot of other things. There is a lot to linear regression (and a lot of gotcha's), but as it's straightforward to do for simple cases. Here's an R example using your data. Note that the "tx" is the intercept to your model.

> y <- c(-44.394, -45.3049, -44.9594)
> a <- c(50.0, 43.0, 52.0)
> b <- c(37.0, 39.0, 41.0)
> regression = lm(y ~ a + b)
> regression

Call:
lm(formula = y ~ a + b)

Coefficients:
(Intercept)            a            b  
  -41.63759      0.07852     -0.18061