BMDP program for piecewise linear regression

Piecewise linear regression has potentially broad applications in medical data analysis as well as other types of regression. Various kinds of algorithms have been proposed for finding optimum piecewise linear regressions. This paper presents a BMDP program for obtaining near optimum piecewise linear regression equations. An idea intrinsic to the method is that restricting parameter space to a discrete set makes the difficult problems become standard problems. Any software having the variable selection feature in the multiple linear regression can be used to apply the method.