Ordinary regression theory

Now, what is interesting about this situation is that ordinary regression theory and the theory of PCA and PLS specify that the model generated must be linear in the coefficients. Nothing is specified about the nature of the data (except that it be noise-free, as our simulated data is) the data may be non-linear to any degree. Ordinarily this is not a problem because any data transform may be used to linearize the data, if that is desirable. 

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