How to force zero interception in linear regression?

Question

I'm a bit of a newby so apologies if this question has already been answered, I've had a look and couldn't find specifically what I was looking for.

I have some more or less linear data of the form

x = [0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0, 6.0, 8.0, 10.0, 20.0, 40.0, 60.0, 80.0]
y = [0.50505332505407008, 1.1207373784533172, 2.1981844719020001, 3.1746209003398689, 4.2905482471260044, 6.2816226678076958, 11.073788414382639, 23.248479770546009, 32.120462301367183, 44.036117671229206, 54.009003143831116, 102.7077685684846, 185.72880217806673, 256.12183145545811, 301.97120103079675]

I am using scipy.optimize.leastsq to fit a linear regression to this:

def lin_fit(x, y):
    '''Fits a linear fit of the form mx+b to the data'''
    fitfunc = lambda params, x: params[0] * x + params[1]    #create fitting function of form mx+b
    errfunc = lambda p, x, y: fitfunc(p, x) - y              #create error function for least squares fit

    init_a = 0.5                            #find initial value for a (gradient)
    init_b = min(y)                         #find initial value for b (y axis intersection)
    init_p = numpy.array((init_a, init_b))  #bundle initial values in initial parameters

    #calculate best fitting parameters (i.e. m and b) using the error function
    p1, success = scipy.optimize.leastsq(errfunc, init_p.copy(), args = (x, y))
    f = fitfunc(p1, x)          #create a fit with those parameters
    return p1, f    

And it works beautifully (although I am not sure if scipy.optimize is the right thing to use here, it might be a bit over the top?).

However, due to the way the data points lie it does not give me a y-axis interception at 0. I do know though that it has to be zero in this case, if x = 0 than y = 0.

Is there any way I can force this?

Answer 1

As @AbhranilDas mentioned, just use a linear method. There's no need for a non-linear solver like scipy.optimize.lstsq.

Typically, you'd use numpy.polyfit to fit a line to your data, but in this case you'll need to do use numpy.linalg.lstsq directly, as you want to set the intercept to zero.

As a quick example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = np.array([0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0, 6.0, 8.0, 10.0, 
              20.0, 40.0, 60.0, 80.0])

y = np.array([0.50505332505407008, 1.1207373784533172, 2.1981844719020001,
              3.1746209003398689, 4.2905482471260044, 6.2816226678076958,
              11.073788414382639, 23.248479770546009, 32.120462301367183, 
              44.036117671229206, 54.009003143831116, 102.7077685684846, 
              185.72880217806673, 256.12183145545811, 301.97120103079675])

# Our model is y = a * x, so things are quite simple, in this case...
# x needs to be a column vector instead of a 1D vector for this, however.
x = x[:,np.newaxis]
a, _, _, _ = np.linalg.lstsq(x, y)

plt.plot(x, y, 'bo')
plt.plot(x, a*x, 'r-')
plt.show()