I would like to experiment with testing the fit of a loess model against the fit from an ordinary linear regression. The 1988 JASA paper by Cleveland and Devlin *appears* to indicate that this can be done, at least ``approximately''. They, as I read it, advocate the use of an ANOVA type test with degree of freedom chosen to make the ``F ratio'' have an approximate F distribution under the null hypothesis. (I have the impression that the approximate F distribution approach has its sceptics in other contexts, but let's not go there for now, please.) The problem for me is that the degrees of freedom values involve the trace of (I - L)(I - L)' --- where L is the matrix effecting the loess fit, i.e. yhat = Ly --- and other trace expressions involving the difference between (I - L)(I - L)' and the corresponding expression for the linear model. The linear model bits I can handle. How do I/can I get at L from the output of loess? Or is there some other approach that I can use, involving quantities that are directly accessible from the loess object? How? Which quantities? Can anyone give me a fairly simple step by step recipe? A Monte Carlo approach (parametric or non-parametric bootstrapping) would seem to be quite feasible, but I thought I'd look for an ``analytic'' approach first. Thanks for any help that anyone can give. cheers, Rolf Turner ###################################################################### Attention:\ This e-mail message is privileged and confid...{{dropped:9}}