Spline Multiscale Smoothing to Control FDR for Exploring Features of Regression Curves

摘要

SiZer (significant zero crossing of the derivatives) is a multiscale smoothing method for exploring trends, maxima, and minima in data. In this article, a regression spline version of SiZer is proposed in a nonparametric regression setting by the fiducial method. The number of knots for spline interpolation is used as the scale parameter of the new SiZer, which controls the smoothness of estimate. In the construction of the new SiZer, multiple testing adjustment is made to control the row-wise false discovery rate (FDR) of SiZer. This adjustment is appealing for exploratory data analysis and has potential to increase the power. A special map is also produced on a continuous scale using p-values to assess the significance of features. Simulations and a real data application are carried out to investigate the performance of the proposed SiZer, in which several comparisons with other existing SiZers are presented. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.