Ryan

Well done! Clean, robust, stylish, and smooth. Ignore the author's own humble words regarding coding quality!

I disagree with Matheca. The function is intended to fit a general gaussian, not necessarily a probability distribution function. The equation is correct.

However, the user should be aware that removing data points in a deterministic manner (i.e. by thresholding) definitely skews the resulting fit.

Rather than fitting to the whole series with negatives removed, try finding the largest contiguous positive subset of the original data series and fitting to that. This method won't work when the noise amplitude is greater than the distribution amplitude, but in most cases it will give you a better fit.

Even better yet: if accuracy is more important than computation speed, use fmincon with a least-squares difference cost function:

p = fmincon(@(p) sum((y-(p(1)*exp(-(x-p(2)).^2/2/p(3)^2))).^2),...
[max(y) mean(x) 1],[],[],[],[],[0 -inf 0],[2*max(y) inf inf])
A=p(1);
mu=p(2);
sigma=p(3);

great, it's funny

Thanks Mingjing for the excellent suggestion!