A New Smoothing Method for Time Series Data in the Presence of Autocorrelated Error

Spline Smoothing is used to filter out noise or disturbance in an observation, its performance depends on the choice of smoothing parameters. There are many methods of estimating smoothing parameters; most popular among them are; Generalized Maximum Likelihood (GML), Generalized Cross-Validation (GCV), and Unbiased Risk (UBR), this methods tend to overfit smoothing parameters in the presence of autocorrelation error. A new Spline Smoothing estimation method is proposed and compare with three existing methods in order to eliminate the problem of over fitting associated with the presence of Autocorrelation in the error term. It is demonstrated through a simulation study performed by using a program written in R based on the predictive Mean Score Error criteria. The result indicated that the predictive mean square error (PMSE) of the four smoothing methods decreases as the smoothing parameters increases and decreases as the sample sizes increases. This study discovered that the proposed smoothing method is the best for time series observations with Autocorrelated error because it doesn’t over fit and works well for large sample sizes. This study will help researchers overcome the problem of over fitting associated with applying Smoothing spline method time series observation.