[R] smooth.spline codes

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "chuanjun" == chuanjun zhang <chzhang at cs.ucr.edu>
>>>>>     on Sun, 01 Aug 2004 12:29:20 -0700 writes:

    chuanjun> The calculation of penalty criterion in smooth.spline 
    chuanjun> is " pen.crit <- sum(wbar * (ybar - fit$ty) *ybar) ", 
    chuanjun> but I think it should be " 
    chuanjun> pen.crit <- sum(wbar * (ybar - fit$ty) * (ybar-fit$ty)) "
    chuanjun> right ?  Why the integral of the
    chuanjun> fit$ty is not included ?  

First: This is only the pen.crit component of
smooth.spline()'s return value, and not the internally used
penalty criterion.

But then you are right.

    chuanjun> Why the integral of the fit$ty is not included ?

Probably the idea was to use the well known trick that

\sum_i{ (y_i - \bar{y})(y_i - \bar{y}) } =
\sum_i{ (y_i - \bar{y}) * y_i }
  since 
\sum_i{ (y_i - \bar{y}) \bar{y} } =
\bar{y} * \sum_i{ (y_i - \bar{y}) } = 0  (because the \sum  is 0).

but then whoever wrote that  pen.crit <- .......... line
confused the two, 'fit$ty' and 'ybar'.

I'm fixing this for R-devel.  
Note once more that this won't change anything in
smooth.spline() computation or it's more important return
value components.

I assume nobody has really used  smooth.spline()'s $pen.crit
component really in a quantitative way (or they should have
found the problem as well). 

Martin Maechler