Experimental data modeling alternating least squares

In contrast to the explicit analytical solution of least-squares fit used in linear regression, our present treatment of data analysis relies on an iterative optimization, which is a completely different approach as a result of the operations discussed in the previous section, theoretical data are calculated, dependent on the model and choice of parameters, which can be compared with the experimental results. The deviation between theoretical and experimental data is usually expressed as the sum of the errors squared for all the data points, alternatively called the sum of squared deviations (SSD) ... 

Two fundamentally different statistical approaches to biomarker selection are possible. With the first, experimental data can be used to construct multivariate statistical models of increasing complexity and predictive power - well-known examples are Partial Least Square Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) (Barker Rayens, 2003 Kemsley, 1996 Szymanska et al., 2011) or Principal Component Linear Discriminant Analysis (PC-LDA) (Smit et al., 2007 Werf et al., 2006). Inspection of the model coefficients then should point to those variables that are important for class discrimination. As an alternative, univariate statistical tests can be... 

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