[R] locfit smoothing question (package maintainer not reachable)

[Suresh Krishna]

David Winsemis wrote:

> I think you should read (or re-read)  the locfit help page and *also*  
> the links from that page to the help pages for locfit.raw and rv. I  
> would have thought that since family= is not an argument to locfit per  
> se, but rather is documented in locfit.raw that you have yet done so,  
> but perhaps not?

I did read the help pages for locfit.raw, and found:

"Local likelihood family; "gaussian"; "binomial"; "poisson"; "gamma" and  
"geom". Density and rate estimation families are "dens", "rate" and  
"hazard" (hazard rate). If the family is preceded by a 'q' (for example,  
family="qbinomial"), quasi-likelihood variance estimates are used.  
Otherwise, the residual variance (rv) is fixed at 1. The default family is  
"qgauss" if a response y is provided; "density" if no response is  
provided. "

However, since the fake data were generated from a known gaussian  
distribution, I did not imagine that using family=gaussian would lead to  
such wildly different results. This is what I was hoping to understand,  
without having to struggle with Catherine's Loader book in order to  
understand the above paragraph deeply enough that this behavior makes  
sense.

Thanks again, Suresh