smoothing splines and degrees of freedom

The help page for 'smooth.spline' says the argument 'df' is 'the 
desired equivalent number of degrees of freedom (trace of the smoother 
matrix).'  It also explains that the output of 'smooth.spline' includes 
a component 'fit', and two components of 'fit' are 'knot' and 'coef'. 
To learn more, you can run the examples, examine 'str(cars.spl)' and the 
other objects produced by those examples.  You can also read more in the 
references cited there.

	  If you would like further help from this group, please submit another 
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"www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html".  There is substantial but 
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answer your question, I believe you would have gotten a better reply if 
you had provided a simple, self-contained example, rather than having me 
rely on one from the 'example' section of the 'smooth.spline' help page.

	  Hope this helps.
	  Spencer Graves

Hi,
If I set df=2 in my smooth.spline function, is that equivalent to running
a linear regression through my data?  It appears that df=# of data points
gives the interpolating spline and that df = 2 gives the linear
regression, but I just want to confirm this.

Thank you,
Steven

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