ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Kernel smoothing

Kernel smoothing is like smoothing out clay with your hands. You know how when you have a lump of clay, it's all lumpy and bumpy? And if you rub your hands over it, it gets smoother? That's kind of like what kernel smoothing does.

Kernel smoothing is a way to make a graph or chart look smoother. It does this by using something called a kernel. Think of the kernel as a little window that moves over the data and smooths out any bumps or wiggles.

Imagine you have a line graph that shows how many cookies you ate each day for a month. You might have some days where you ate a lot of cookies and some days where you didn't eat any. If you just plotted these points on a graph, it would look very bumpy and hard to read.

But if you used kernel smoothing, the graph would look smoother. The kernel would move over the points, and for each point, it would look at the neighboring points and create a new point that is a weighted average of those neighbors. It would keep doing this for each point, smoothing out any bumps.

So, if on Monday, you ate 5 cookies, and on Tuesday, you ate 12 cookies, the kernel might create a new point for Monday that's closer to 8 cookies (a weighted average of Monday and Tuesday), and a new point for Tuesday that's closer to 9 cookies (a weighted average of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday).

By using kernel smoothing, you can make a graph look more readable and easier to understand.