in reply to Statistics::LineFit versus gnuplot, results differ

kevbot is on to something here. The two systems use rather different methods for fitting the data.

Statistics::LineFit and LibreOffice are doing a standard linear least squares fit. This is not an iterative process and is not dependent on any initial guesses.

The Gnuplot documentation for fit says that it uses a nonlinear least-squares (NLLS) Marquardt-Levenberg algorithm.