Calculating the slope of a series of values

Question

I have 2 arrays of equal length. The following function attempts to calculate the slope using these arrays. It returns the average of the slope between each points. For the foll

Answer 1

This function will not help you much, as it does not take into account the breadths of the various line segments. Consider the differences in applying it to the points (0,0), (1000,1000), and (1001, 2000) versus (0,0), (1,1), and (2, 1001). Both cases have successive slopes 1 and 1000, yet they look greatly different.

You need to implement the method of least squares: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares to find the line that best approximates your data set.

One more piece of advice: never throw a java.lang.Exception. Always choose a more-specific exception, even if you must write the class yourself. People using your code will need to handle java.lang.Exception, which interferes badly with their other code.