A number of criteria exist to select the penalty in penalized spline regression, but the selection of the number of spline basis functions has received much less attention in the literature. We propose a likelihood-based criterion to select the number of basis functions in penalized spline...

type="main" xml:id="sjos12045-abs-0001" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title>Small area estimation has long been a popular and important research topic due to its growing demand in public and private sectors. We consider here the basic area level model, popularly known as the Fay–Herriot model. Although much of current...

The authors propose a method for fitting regression models to data that exhibit spatial correlation and heteroskedasticity. A combination of parametric and nonparametric regression techniques is used to iteratively estimate the various components of the model. The approach is demonstrated on a...