Abstract
A smoothed nonparametric method for estimating the intrinsic distribution of truncated sample data is described. This method determines both the cumulative and differential forms of the distribution, and it does not suffer from the numerical fluctuations associated with histogram distributions commonly used to describe such data. Variation of a single smoothing parameter provides a convenient means of error estimation and allows for differentiation between random fluctuations and subtle features which may exist in the parent distribution. The smoothing method is useful for obtaining distribution functions for flux or magnitude-limited astronomical data, and as an example, we calculate the smoothed luminosity function of a flux-limited sample of ∼500 quasars.
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