Fitting a line in 3D

Question

Are there any algorithms that will return the equation of a straight line from a set of 3D data points? I can find plenty of sources which will give the equation of a line f

Answer 1

If your data is fairly well behaved then it should be sufficient to find the least squares sum of the component distances. Then you can find the linear regression with z independent of x and then again independent of y.

Following the documentation example:

import numpy as np

pts = np.add.accumulate(np.random.random((10,3)))
x,y,z = pts.T

# this will find the slope and x-intercept of a plane
# parallel to the y-axis that best fits the data
A_xz = np.vstack((x, np.ones(len(x)))).T
m_xz, c_xz = np.linalg.lstsq(A_xz, z)[0]

# again for a plane parallel to the x-axis
A_yz = np.vstack((y, np.ones(len(y)))).T
m_yz, c_yz = np.linalg.lstsq(A_yz, z)[0]

# the intersection of those two planes and
# the function for the line would be:
# z = m_yz * y + c_yz
# z = m_xz * x + c_xz
# or:
def lin(z):
    x = (z - c_xz)/m_xz
    y = (z - c_yz)/m_yz
    return x,y

#verifying:
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure()
ax = Axes3D(fig)
zz = np.linspace(0,5)
xx,yy = lin(zz)
ax.scatter(x, y, z)
ax.plot(xx,yy,zz)
plt.savefig('test.png')
plt.show()

If you want to minimize the actual orthogonal distances from the line (orthogonal to the line) to the points in 3-space (which I'm not sure is even referred to as linear regression). Then I would build a function that computes the RSS and use a scipy.optimize minimization function to solve it.