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Under documentation click on Manuals amd you will find "An Introduction to R". However, you should, with any luck, be able to follow the instructions below, without getting more deeply into R.

Use R Function smooth.Pspline to fit a Smoothing Spline

In our course, we will mainly use it to do experiment about fitting smooth curves. We will use function smooth.Pspline in R. You will find some help and examples about how to use this function below. There are also some useful examples and R programs related to our course.
smooth.Pspline            package:pspline            R Documentation

Fit a Polynomial Smoothing Spline of Arbitrary Order

Description:

     Returns an object of class `"smooth.Pspline"' which is a natural 
     polynomial smooth of the input data of order fixed by the user.

Usage:

     smooth.Pspline(x, y, w=rep(1, length(x)), norder=2, df=norder + 2, 
                    spar=0, method=1)
     sm.spline(x, y, w, cv=FALSE, ...)

Arguments:

       x: values of the predictor variable.  These must be strictly
          increasing, and there must be at least `2*norder + 1' of
          them.

          `sm.spline' provides a simplified interface, in which the `x'
          values can be unsorted, or a list with components `"x"' and
          `"y"' or a two-column matrix or a complex vector. 

       y: one or more sets of response variable values.  If there is
          one response variable, `y' is an array of the same length as
          `x'; if more than one, then `y' is a matrix with `length(x)'
          rows and number of columns equal to the number of variables. 

       w: vector of positive weights for smoothing of the same length
          as `x'. If measurements at different values of `x' have
          different variances, `w' should be inversely proportional to
          the variances.  The default is that all weights are one. 

  norder: the order of the spline.  `norder = 2' gives the cubic
          smoothing spline, and more generally the smoothing function
          is a piecewise polynomial of degree `2*norder - 1'.  If
          derivatives are to be computed from the smoothing using
          `predict.smooth.Pspline', the order should be one or two more
          than the highest order of derivative. 

      df: a number which specifies the degrees of freedom = trace(S). 
          Here S is the implicit smoothing matrix.  `df' controls the
          amount of smoothing if `method = 2'. 

    spar: the usual smoothing parameter for smoothing splines, which is
          the coefficient of the integrated squared derivative of order
          `norder'. `spar' controls the amount of smoothing if `method
          = 1'. 

      cv: logical: should ordinary cross-validation be used (true) or
          generalized cross-validation.

  method: the method for controlling the amount of smoothing.  `method
          = 1' uses the value supplied for `spar'.  `method = 2'
          adjusts `spar' so that the degrees of freedom is equal to
          `df'.  `method = 3' adjusts `spar' so that the generalized
          cross-validation criterion is minimized.  `method = 4'
          adjusts `spar' so that the ordinary cross-validation
          criterion is minimized.  If `method = 3' or `method = 4',
          `spar' defines the initial value for the minimization
          algorithm if positive; otherwise an internally generated
          value is used.

          `sm.spline' chooses this automatically based on the supplied
          values and that of `cv'. 

     ...: additional arguments to be passed to `smooth.Pspline'. 

Details:

     The method produces results similar to function `smooth.spline',
     but the smoothing function is a natural smoothing spline rather
     than a B-spline smooth, and as a consequence will differ slightly
     for `norder = 2' over the initial and final intervals.  

     The main extension is the possibility of setting the order of
     derivative to be penalized, so that derivatives of any order can
     be computed using the companion function `predict.smooth.Pspline'.
      The algorithm is of order N, meaning that the number of floating
     point operations is proportional to the number of values being
     smoothed. Note that the argument values must be strictly
     increasing, a condition that is not required by `smooth.spline'.

     Note that the appropriate or minimized value of the smoothing
     parameter `spar' will depend heavily on the order; the larger the
     order, the smaller this parameter will tend to be.

Value:

     an object of class `"smooth.Pspline"' is returned, consisting of
     the fitted smoothing spline evaluated at the supplied data, some
     fitting criteria and constants.  This object contains the
     information necessary to evaluate the smoothing spline or one of
     its derivatives at arbitrary argument values using
     `predict.smooth.Pspline'.  The components of the returned list are

References:

     Heckman, N. and Ramsay, J. O. (1996) Spline smoothing with model
     based penalties.  McGill University, unpublished manuscript.

See Also:

     `predict.smooth.Pspline', `smooth.spline'

Examples:

     data(cars)
     attach(cars)
     plot(speed, dist, main = "data(cars)  &  smoothing splines")
     cars.spl <- sm.spline(speed, dist)
     cars.spl
     lines(cars.spl, col = "blue")
     lines(sm.spline(speed, dist, df=10), lty=2, col = "red")

An example

Here is a complete example on how to generate random data, fitting the curve and plotting the result. (note the sentences after the pound key (#) are R comments, you don't have to type those.)
set.seed(100) #set initial seed for random number generator

n <- 100
x <- (1:n)/n  #we will use 100 equally spaced design point from 0 to 1

true <- ((exp(1.2*x)+1.5*sin(7*x))-1)/3 #true function in this simulation

noise <- rnorm(n, 0, 0.15)
#generate n independent normal random number with 0 mean and variance 0.15

y <- true + noise #y is observed values (true value + noise)

#or you can read data from a file:
#dat <- read.table("hw1.dat", header=T)
#attach(dat)

library(pspline) #load the package containing the smooth.Pspline function
fit <- smooth.Pspline(x, y, method=3)
#fit smoothing spline on noisy data using GCV score (method=3). use method=1
#with a user specified smoothing parameter (spar) if you want to try different
#degree of smoothing.

postscript("result.ps", height=4, width=5, horizo=F)
#initialize graphic output 
#(PS file for print, you can use Ghostview or gv command to view it)
#alternatively, you can use motif() to view it on screen

plot(x, y, xlab="x", ylab="y", cex=0.5) #plot data point
lines(x, true, lty=2) #plot true function
lines(fit$x, fit$y) #plot smooth spline fit

graphics.off()
#output to PS file
#if you use motif(), you can shut down motif window by using dev.off()

Data for experiment

You can download data
HERE . There are 100 data points in this file. X is equally spaced between 0 and 1. Y is response variable.


Thanks to Fangyu Gao for the original version of the help file (about S-Plus), later updated by Xianhong Xie and the newest version from Xiwen Ma. If you have any questions, send your email to
dai@stat.wisc.edu