Statistics: monotone_smooth

### Function Reference: `monotone_smooth`

statistics: yy = monotone_smooth (x, y, h)

Produce a smooth monotone increasing approximation to a sampled functional dependence.

A kernel method is used (an Epanechnikov smoothing kernel is applied to y(x); this is integrated to yield the monotone increasing form. See Reference 1 for details.)

### Arguments

- x is a vector of values of the independent variable.
- y is a vector of values of the dependent variable, of the same size as x. For best performance, it is recommended that the y already be fairly smooth, e.g. by applying a kernel smoothing to the original values if they are noisy.
- h is the kernel bandwidth to use. If h is not given, a "reasonable" value is computed.

### Return values

- yy is the vector of smooth monotone increasing function values at x.

### Examples

     x = 0:0.1:10;
     y = (x .^ 2) + 3 * randn(size(x)); # typically non-monotonic from the added
     noise
     ys = ([y(1) y(1:(end-1))] + y + [y(2:end) y(end)])/3; # crudely smoothed via
     moving average, but still typically non-monotonic
     yy = monotone_smooth(x, ys); # yy is monotone increasing in x
     plot(x, y, '+', x, ys, x, yy)

### References

1. Holger Dette, Natalie Neumeyer and Kay F. Pilz (2006), A simple nonparametric estimator of a strictly monotone regression function, Bernoulli, 12:469-490
2. Regine Scheder (2007), R Package ’monoProc’, Version 1.0-6, http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/monoProc/monoProc.pdf (The implementation here is based on the monoProc function mono.1d)

Source Code: monotone_smooth