Abstract
The B-spline method for scatterplot smoothing has the advantages of simplicity and time-economization in its computation over other nonparametric smoothing methods such as the kernel method, whereas it has the disadvantage of instability due to over-fitting data with a complicated trend because of the excess flexibility. In this paper, we modify this demerit of the B-spline method by introducing an information criterion for optimization of the number of knots and the smoothing parameter to avoid over-fitting.
