Model of a Natural Phenomenon

A model that can be generated from a natural phenomenon is bacterial growth. As a final
project for my Math Modeling class, my group members and I decided to record the amount of
bacteria present on petri dishes after swabbing them with strawberries every two hours over a
two day period. We used 20 different strawberries and 20 different petri in order to make our
results as accurate as possible. From the data collected, we created a graph of the total average
bacteria present at each time interval of every trial. The graph of this average data was the
following:

By looking at the graph, we were able to realize that we were dealing with data that
represented a logistic function. In order to test our reasoning, we ran a logistic regression on our
data with an N-Spire calculator and retrieved the following equation and graph:







From the graph that illustrates this regression, we can observe that nearly all of the data
points lie on, or are close to, the best fit line. This meant that the logistic regression was a very
close approximation of the type of function that was represented by the data. At this point, we
were nearly positive that our model was a logistic function. However, in order to be certain, we
also looked at the residual plot of this regression. It was the following:

From this plot, we can see that the points are evenly distributed above and below e=0, which
indicates that this regression fit the data.