1 Introduction

The R package splines2 is intended to be a user-friendly supplementary package to the base package splines. It provides functions to construct a variety of regression spline basis functions that are not available from splines. Most functions have a very similar user interface with the function splines::bs(). More specifically, splines2 allows users to construct the basis functions of

• B-splines
• M-splines
• I-splines
• C-splines
• periodic splines
• natural cubic splines
• generalized Bernstein polynomials

along with their integrals (except C-splines) and derivatives of given order by closed-form recursive formulas.

Compared to splines, the package splines2 provides convenient interfaces for spline derivatives with consistent handling on NA’s. Most of the implementations are in C++ with the help of Rcpp and RcppArmadillo since v0.3.0, which boosted the computational performance.

In the remainder of this vignette, we illustrate the basic usage of most functions in the package through examples. We refer readers to Wang and Yan (2021) for a more formal introduction to the package with applications to shape-restricted regression. See the package manual for more details about function usage.

library(splines2)
packageVersion("splines2")

## [1] '0.5.4'

2 B-splines

2.1 B-spline Basis Functions

The bSpline() function generates the basis matrix for B-splines and extends the function bs() of the package splines by providing 1) the piece-wise constant basis functions when degree = 0, 2) the derivatives of basis functions for a positive derivs, 3) the integrals of basis functions if integral = TRUE, 4) periodic basis functions based on B-splines if periodic = TRUE.

One example of linear B-splines with three internal knots is as follows:

knots <- c(0.3, 0.5, 0.6)
x <- seq(0, 1, 0.01)
bsMat <- bSpline(x, knots = knots, degree = 1, intercept = TRUE)
plot(bsMat, mark_knots = "all")

B-splines of degree one with three internal knots placed at 0.3, 0.5, and 0.6.

2.2 Integrals and Derivatives of B-splines

For convenience, the package also provides functions ibs() and dbs() for constructing the B-spline integrals and derivatives, respectively. Two toy examples are as follows:

ibsMat <- ibs(x, knots = knots, degree = 1, intercept = TRUE)
op <- par(mfrow = c(1, 2))
plot(bsMat, mark_knots = "internal")
plot(ibsMat, mark_knots = "internal")
abline(h = c(0.15, 0.2, 0.25), lty = 2, col = "gray")

Piecewise linear B-splines (left) and their integrals (right).

bsMat <- bSpline(x, knots = knots, intercept = TRUE)
dbsMat <- dbs(x, knots = knots, intercept = TRUE)
plot(bsMat, mark_knots = "internal")
plot(dbsMat, mark_knots = "internal")