ruth@utstat.UUCP (03/29/89)
Colloquium Series, Department of Statistics, University of Toronto Topic: Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines Speaker: Jerome H. Friedman, Department of Statistics and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University Date: Friday, March 31, 1989 10:00 a.m. Place: Room 1074, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George St., U of T Abstract: A new method is presented for flexible regression modeling of high dimensional data. The model takes the form of an expansion in product spline basis functions where the number of basis functions as well as the parameters associated with each one (product degree and knot locations) are automatically determined by the data. This procedure is motivated by the recursive partitioning approach to regression and shares its attractive properties. Unlike recursive partitioning, however, this method produces continuous models with continuous derivatives. It has more power and flexibility to model relationships that are nearly additive or involve interactions in at most a few variables. In addition, the model can be represented in a form that identifies separately the additive contribution of each variable, as well as the individual contributions associated with the different multivariable interactions.