Chapter 13.3, Problem 10P

Sometimes curvature in a scatterplot can be fit adequately (especially to the naked eye) by several trend lines. We discussed the exponential trend line, and the power trend line is discussed in the previous problem. Still another fairly simple trend line is the parabola, a polynomial of order 2 (also called a quadratic). For the demand-price data in the file P13_10.xlsx, fit all three of these types of trend lines to the data, and calculate the MAPE for each. Which provides the best fit? (Hint: Note that a polynomial of order 2 is still another of Excel’s Trend line options.)