ELEC 471, Spring 1999
Prof. Rich Kozick

Homework 10


Date Assigned: Friday, April 16, 1999
Date Due: Thursday, April 22, 1999


  1. Final Exam: The final exam will be on Thursday, April 29, 1999 at 8:00 AM in room BIOL 5. Both sections of the course (8-11 AM and 1-4 PM) will have the final exam at the same time.

    All students are required to take the final exam. It will include material from the entire course, but it will emphasize the topics that we discussed after Exam 2.

  2. Please solve the following problems in the text.
    Section 4.1: 1 and 2

    Section 4.2: 1 and 2

    Section 4.3: 1 (should be straightforward from reading the text)

  3. Suppose that X and Y are two variables that can be approximately described by the linear function Y = a X for some value of the constant a. Your job is to determine or "estimate" the value of a from the following five pairs of measurements of (X, Y): 
       X         Y
  ---       ---

 1.00     0.688
 1.78     0.849
 3.16     2.152
 5.62     3.024
10.00     5.453
    A MATLAB program hw10.m is linked to this assignment on the Web. The MATLAB program plots the data values, and it also allows you to plot the "fit" provided by the equation Y = a X for values of the parameter a that you set in the program.

    What do you think is the "best" estimate of the parameter a to fit the given data with the relation Y = a X? Justify your answer as quantitatively as you can. Explain exactly how you arrived at your choice of a. Note that there is not a single correct answer, but there are many incorrect answers!

Thank you.