logoalt Hacker News

ryang2718last Sunday at 10:04 PM3 repliesview on HN

I find it helpful to view least as fitting the noise to a Gaussian distribution.


Replies

MontyCarloHalllast Monday at 2:24 AM

They both fit Gaussians, just different ones! OLS fits a 1D Gaussian to the set of errors in the y coordinates only, whereas TLS (PCA) fits a 2D Gaussian to the set of all (x,y) pairs.

show 1 reply
LudwigNagasenalast Sunday at 10:39 PM

OLS estimator is the minimum-variance linear unbiased estimator even without the assumption of Gaussian distribution.

show 1 reply
contravariantlast Monday at 12:24 AM

Both of these do, in a way. They just differ in which gaussian distribution they're fitting to.

And how I suppose. PCA is effectively moment matching, least squares is max likelihood. These correspond to the two ways of minimizing the Kullback Leibler divergence to or from a gaussian distribution.