Everything you wanted to know about Data Analysis and Fitting but were afraid to ask

Understand

These notes discuss, in a style intended for physicists, how to average data and fit it to some functional form.

• I try to make clear what is being calculated, what assumptions are being made, and to give a derivation of results rather than just quote them.
• The aim is put a lot useful pedagogical material together in a convenient place.
• This manuscript is a substantial enlargement of lecture notes I prepared for the Bad Honnef School on "Efficient Algorithms in Computational Physics", September 10-14, 2012.