Proper phrasing of error bars in an essay

Hi,

I have used custom option on the cftool for curve fitting of my data using my formula of interest. To extract the error bars of the fit parameters, I used the confint MATLAB tool. How can I phrase the error bars on my fit in scientifically correct terms? Any better or more precise phrasing compared to the following sentence?

The error bars are the goodness of the fit with 95% confidence bounds.

Best wishes, Moha

[emma]

The error bars are the goodness of the fit with 95% confidence bounds.

Answer 1

[Divyam]

Hi @mo mostafavi,

The error bars derived from "confint" in MATLAB represent the uncertainty in the fitted parameter based on a confidence interval. They are not a direct measure of "goodness of fit" (which is more related to , RMSE, etc.).

This is because "confint" gives lower and upper bounds for each parameter computed while assuming a certain confidence level and based on the standard error of the estimate. These bounds quantify the uncertainty in parameter estimation not the overall fit quality.

Hence, a better way to phrase your findings would be, "Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals of the fitted parameters."

For more information regarding the "confint" function, refer to the following documentation: https://www.mathworks.com/help/curvefit/cfit.confint.html