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I just learned how to find the exponential function that approximates a dataset by taking the logarithm of the data points, doing a linear regression on that data, then working out the exponential equation from that.

This is very clever. Who invented this technique?

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    Clever perhaps, but often not a good idea. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_regression#Linearization or http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html for some words of warning.2011-06-21

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The wikipedia article on regression analysis contains a decent description of the history of the technique and it's worth checking out.

Is there any other reasons you might be interested with this?

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    The idea of taking logarith$m$s to make some things linear is actually really old. So many scales are actually logarithmic (sounds, luminosity, energy, information) that it doesn't look like this would be noticed (the use of regression though would).2011-06-21