Smoothing Techniques for Visualisation

Abstract

Graphical displays are often constructed to place principal focus on the individual observations in a dataset, and this is particularly helpful in identifying both the typical positions of datapoints and unusual or influential cases. However, in many investigations, principal interest lies in identifying the nature of underlying trends and relationships between variables, and so it is often helpful to enhance graphical displays in wayswhich give deeper insight into these features.This can be very beneficial both for small datasets, where variation can obscure underlying patterns, and large datasets, where the volume of data is so large that effective representation inevitably involves suitable summaries.