Splines are an attractive way of flexibly modeling a regression curve since their basis functions can be included like ordinary covariates in regression settings. An overview of least squares regression using splines is presented including many graphical illustrations and comprehensive examples....

We propose a new method to find spatially adaptive smoothing splines. This new method breaks down the interval [0, 1] into p disjoint sub-intervals. Then we define p functional components in [0, 1], which have two importantfeatures. First, the purpose of each of these p components is to estimate...

The paper analyses the effect of fixed-term contracts on the probability of finding a permanent job in the Italian labour market. I estimate a continuous proportional hazard model with nonparametric smoothing splines for time varying continuous covariates. It will be shown that such a method...