[R] smoothing splines and degrees of freedom

[i.m.s.white]

Steven,

I cannot vouch for the behaviour of the function smooth.spline(), but
the theoretical answer to your question is yes. If g = Sy is the transformation
from data vector y to spline vector g, the equivalent degrees of freedom are
usually defined as EDF = trace(S), where S is the n x n smoothing matrix:

EDF = sum_i(1/(1+theta*lambda_i)),

where lambda_1 to lambda_n are the eigenvalues of S. Two of these are zero, so

EDF = 2 + sum(1/(1+theta*lambda_i))

the sum now over i=3 to n. Here theta is the smoothing parameter. Setting
theta = 0 (no smoothing) gives EDF=n and produces the interpolating spline.
Setting theta = infty gives EDF=2 and a straight line fit. See either

Green and Silverman, Nonparametric regression and generalized linear models,
(p37), or
Hastie and Tibshirani, Generalized additive models, p52.

On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 11:35:16AM -0400, Steven Shechter wrote:
> Hi,
> If I set df=2 in my smooth.spline function, is that equivalent to running
> a linear regression through my data?  It appears that df=# of data points
> gives the interpolating spline and that df = 2 gives the linear
> regression, but I just want to confirm this.
> 
> Thank you,
> Steven
> 
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