Q: Type of regression for large dataset, nonlinear, skewed in R I'm researching moth biomass in different biotopes, and I want to find a model that estimates the biomass. I have measured the length and width of the forewing, abdomen and thorax of 37088 specimens, and I have weighed them individually (dried).
First, I wanted to a simple linear regression of each variable on the biomass. The problem is, none of the assumptions are met. The data is not linear, biomass (and some variables) don't follow a normal distribution, there is heteroskedasticity, and a lot of outliers. Now I have tried to transform my data using log, x^2, 1/x, and boxcox, but none of them actually helped. I have also tried Thiel-Sen regression (not possible because of too much data) and Siegel regression (biomass is not a vector). Is there some other form of non-parametric or median-based regression that I can try? Because I am really out of ideas.
Here is a frequency histogram for biomass:
Frequency histogram dry biomass
So what I actually want to do is to build a model that accurately estimates the dry biomass, based on the measurements I performed. I have a power function (Rogers et al.) that is general for all insects, but there is a significant difference between this estimate and what I actually weighed. Therefore, I just want to build to build a model with all significant variables. I am not very familiar with power functions, but maybe it is possible to build one myself? Can anyone recommend a method? Thanks in advance.

A: To fit a power function, you could perhaps try nlsLM from the minpack.lm package

library(minpack.lm)
m <- nlsLM( y ~ a*x^b, data=your.data.here )


Then see if it performs satisfactory.
