Terry Fields wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Terry Fields wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Terry Fields wrote:
Roger wrote:

I am tempted to write to the Met Office about the bizarre way they
terminate their smoothing filter. Doubt if that will even provoke a
response let alone nudge them onto something a bit less extreme.
I'm sure you'll get a reply, but the chances are it will be some sort
of fob-off.

But why have a smoothing filter at all? Why not perform some sort of
regression or other statistical analysis on the data set?
What is a smoothing tool if not an example of that?
It's the difference bewteen 'smoothing' the data, which doesn't seem
to do anything but tidy up the appearance, and statistics that tell
you everything about the data - IOW, chalk and cheese.

Oh dear oh dear.

I see..

You're always at liberty to publish data that has been smoothed, and
compare that with the same data that has been statistically analysed,
to demonstrate how much better smoothing is for determining the
underlying trends.

You miss the point. Smoothing is what statistics do. Its just another
compression algorithm.

You are comparing apples and apples and calling them oranges.

The innate characteristic of any compression algorithm is that it
innately implies an underlaying pattern in the data, and seeks to find
that pattern and suppress the noise.

What you are essentially doing when analysing, smoothing, or whatever a
time series, is applying a low pass filter to it: What the filter has as
output is critically dependent on the form of the filter. You are merely
comparing two different forms of filter..and if they give different
results, that merely calls into question the validity of using ANY of them.