In which spline regression becomes a matter of life and death in Chicago.
Posted by crshalizi at February 07, 2012 10:31 | permanent link
Kernel regression controls the amount of smoothing indirectly by bandwidth; why not control the irregularity of the smoothed curve directly? The spline smoothing problem is a penalized least squares problem: minimize mean squared error, plus a penalty term proportional to average curvature of the function over space. The solution is always a continuous piecewise cubic polynomial, with continuous first and second derivatives. Altering the strength of the penalty moves along a bias-variance trade-off, from pure OLS at one extreme to pure interpolation at the other; changing the strength of the penalty is equivalent to minimizing the mean squared error under a constraint on the average curvature. To ensure consistency, the penalty/constraint should weaken as the data grows; the appropriate size is selected by cross-validation. An example with the data, including confidence bands. Writing splines as basis functions, and fitting as least squares on transformations of the data, plus a regularization term. A brief look at splines in multiple dimensions. Splines versus kernel regression.
Reading: Notes, chapter 7; Faraway, section 11.2.
Posted by crshalizi at February 07, 2012 10:30 | permanent link