Using the structure of the residuals to evaluate the goodness of fit : a pedagogical case study with Newton’s law of cooling
Introductions to data analysis in university physics often focus on fitting (typically to linearised functions) and uncertainty propagation, but residuals are less commonly introduced. Structured residuals indicate that the function (theoretical description) used to fit data does not capture all the relevant elements (i.e. the theoretical description is incomplete), and can be present even when th
