What is LOESS?

On scatter plots, such as the Graph Columns output, a LOESS (sometimes called LOWESS) fitting object can make it easier to see the relationship between two columns in the data set.

Sliding the bandwidth left towards 0 (left) will begin to fit every data point, while sliding the bandwidth towards 1 (right) will tend to fit only the more extreme values.

The LOESS fit is not intended to be used as a predictive model, only as a visual aid.

References

  • William S. Cleveland. Robust locally weighted regression and smoothing scatterplots. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 74(368):829–836, 1979.