Smoothing your data

As an option to the plot command, gnuplot offers several smoothing functions. The name smooth is a bit misleading. Included in the options for the smooth plotstyle are several ways to process your data that would not most naturally be described as smoothing. We give examples of some of these in the following recipes. In the current recipe we show how to use the smoothing option that seems to be most immediately useful if you have some noisy data and want to draw a qualitatively smooth curve through it, to, as they say, guide the eye.

Getting ready

This recipe uses the datafile rs.dat; make sure that it is in your current directory. This file contains two columns that are the x and y coordinates of a simple sine wave of frequency ...

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