WhittakerSmooth: Calculate Whittaker-Eilers Smoothing, Interpolation and...

In openair: Tools for the Analysis of Air Pollution Data

Calculate Whittaker-Eilers Smoothing, Interpolation and Baseline Determination

Description

This function applies the Whittaker-Eilers smoothing and interpolation method to a specified pollutant in a data frame. The method is based on penalised least squares and is designed to handle time series data with missing values, providing a smoothed estimate of the pollutant concentrations over time. The function allows for flexible control over the amount of smoothing through the lambda parameter and can be applied to multiple pollutants simultaneously.

Usage

WhittakerSmooth(
  mydata,
  pollutant = "o3",
  lambda = 24L,
  d = 2,
  type = "default",
  new.name = NULL,
  date.pad = FALSE,
  p = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

mydata	A data frame containing a date field. mydata must contain a date field in Date or POSIXct format.
pollutant	The name of a pollutant, e.g., pollutant = "o3". More than one pollutant can be supplied as a vector, e.g., pollutant = c("o3", "nox").
lambda	The value of lambda to use in the smoothing. This controls the amount of smoothing, with higher values leading to smoother results. If lambda = NA Generalised Cross Validation (GCV) is used to select the optimal value of lambda for each pollutant. This can be time consuming, so a fixed value of lambda is recommended for large datasets or multiple pollutants. Note that the value of lambda needs to increase exponentially to smooth long time series data of several years e.g. lambda = 10e9.
d	The order used to penalise the roughness of the data. By default this is set to 2, which penalises the second derivative of the data. Setting d = 1 will penalise the first derivative, which can be useful for smoothing data with sharp peaks or troughs. Setting d = 1 will effectively linearly interpolate across missing data.
type	Used for splitting the data further. Passed to cutData().
new.name	The name given to the new column(s). If not supplied it will create a name based on the name of the pollutant.
date.pad	Should missing dates be padded? Default is FALSE.
p	The asymmetry weight parameter used exclusively for baseline estimation (Asymmetric Least Squares). It defines how the algorithm treats points that fall above the fitted line versus points that fall below it. It takes a value between 0 and 1. When p is very small, the algorithm assigns a massive penalty to the curve if it rises above the data points, but almost no penalty if it drops below them. This forces the curve to "hug" the bottom of the signal, effectively ignoring the positive peaks. Typical Values: 0.01 to 0.05.
...	Additional parameters passed to cutData(). For use with type.

Details

In addition to smoothing, the function can also perform baseline estimation using Asymmetric Least Squares (ALS) when the p parameter is provided. This allows for the separation of the underlying baseline from the observed data, which can be particularly useful for identifying trends or correcting for background levels in pollutant concentrations.

The function is designed to work with regularly spaced time series.

Value

A tibble with new columns for the smoothed pollutant values.

Author(s)

David Carslaw

References

Paul H. C. Eilers, A Perfect Smoother, Analytical Chemistry 2003 75 (14), 3631-3636, DOI: 10.1021/ac034173t

Examples

# Smoothing with lambda = 24
mydata <- WhittakerSmooth(mydata, pollutant = "o3", lambda = 24)

openair documentation built on April 2, 2026, 9:07 a.m.