An article in the American Statistician perhaps 5 years ago on the accuracy of statistical software recommended using nlminb first to find the least squares solution and then pass those numbers to nls to get confidence intervals. More recently, optim has replaced nlminb for such purposes, as far as I know. In addition, optim will optionally output the Hessian from which approximate confidence intervals can be obtained. I have not used this recently, but I would expect that "profile" on the nls fit would give better confidence intervals.

hth. spencer graves

Suchandra Thapa wrote:
I'm running into problems trying to use the nls function to fit the some
data. I'm invoking nls using


nls(s~k/(a+r)^b, start=list(k=1, a=13, b=0.59))

but I get errors indicating that the step has been reduced below the
minimum step size or an inifinity is generated in numericDeriv. I've
tried to use a variety of starting values for a, b, k but get similar
errors.


Is there anything I can do to get the a fit or is there an alternative
to the nls function?


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