Modeling some real phenomena by fractional differential equations

This paper deals with fractional differential equations with dependence on a Caputo fractional derivative of real order. The goal is to show, based on concrete examples and experimental data from several experiments, that fractional differential equations may model more efficiently certain problems than ordinary differential equations. A numerical optimization approach based on least squares approximation is used to determine the order of the fractional operator that better describes real data, as well as other related parameters. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.