Smooth line connecting point?

[Shi Y. Yan]

Hello,

Does anyone here happen to know how to make a smooth line connecting points (time series), not through points like fitting line? I know excel can do it but how to make stata graph like that?

Thanks very much for the help.

[Nick Cox]

I can't see why you would want to emulate Excel here. That's a classic example of spurious overfitting. If A to E are distinct categories it doesn't even make sense to talk about smooth transitions here.

But look at twoway mspline which may make sense for your real data.

[Maarten Buis]

What are your exact requirements?

• Do you want to force the line to go exactly through the points, but do so smoothly, or
• do want to find a smooth line that summarizes the trend without forcing the line to hit each point?

The former is what Excel does, but is usually a bad idea. For the latter you can look at help tssmooth for various ways of doing that.