smoothing
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thumb | right | Simple exponential smoothing example. Raw data: mean daily temperatures at the Paris-Montsouris weather station (France) from 1960/01/01 to 1960/02/29. Smoothed data with alpha factor = 0.1. In statistics and image processing, to smooth a data set is to create an approximating function that attempts to capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise or other fine-scale structures/rapid phenomena. In smoothing, the data points of a signal are modified so individual points higher than the adjacent points (presumably because of noise) are reduced, and points that a
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Encyclopedic overview
5 sectionsContents
- Compared to curve fitting
- Linear smoothers
- Algorithms
- References
- Further reading
thumb | right | Simple exponential smoothing example. Raw data: mean daily temperatures at the Paris-Montsouris weather station (France) from 1960/01/01 to 1960/02/29. Smoothed data with alpha factor = 0.1. In statistics and image processing, to smooth a data set is to create an approximating function that attempts to capture important patterns in the data, while leaving out noise or other fine-scale structures/rapid phenomena. In smoothing, the data points of a signal are modified so individual points higher than the adjacent points (presumably because of noise) are reduced, and points that are lower than the adjacent points are increased, leading to a smoother signal.
Reducing noise by smoothing may aid in data analysis in two notable ways: Help uncover more meaningful information from the underlying data, such as trends. Provide analyses that are both flexible and robust.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “smoothing” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.