Because linear equations are so much easier to solve than nonlinear ones, much research across a range of disciplines is devoted to finding linear approximations of nonlinear phenomena.

The same thing would be true for the first function above, f(x) = x²: n² would equal n.This would be a weird mathematics indeed (there are algebras in which this happens for some nonunit ...

Often, regression models that appear nonlinear upon first glance are actually linear. The curve estimation procedure can be used to identify the nature of the functional relationships at play in ...