Introductory Text for GAM

Question

I'm looking for a text to help someone who uses GLMs in practice become familiar/comfortable with GAMs. Online or physical textbook would be fine. I am approaching this as a practitioner, so I would prefer practical to theoretical, but I'm confident I have the background to digest a more theoretical text if it happens to be particularly worthwhile.

I also use R, almost exclusively. If you happen to know of some R oriented texts/tutorials that'd be really appreciated.

I would go with Simon Wood's [Generalised Additive Models: an introduction with R](http://www.maths.bath.ac.uk/~sw283/igam/index.html). Even though **mgcv** has moved on a lot from what was used in this book (See `citation(package = "mgcv")` for some of the more recent proper papers on the methods), this remains one of the best books I know for learning about GAMs (and GLMs) with a practical side in R and a theoretical side. — Gavin Simpson, Aug 01 '14 at 16:00
I ordered Gavin's book. It appears to be the perfect suggestion. I agree that he should have made it an answer. — Eric, Aug 14 '14 at 13:29

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 01 '14 at 18:00

Buja et al., (1989) give a nice overview of GAMs in the context of other additive nonparametric smoothing models. If I recall correctly, most of their examples can be easily done in R using existing packages.

Buja, A., Hastie, T., and Tibshirani, R. (1989). Linear Smoothers and Additive Models. The Annals of Statistics, 17(2):453–510.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 27 '18 at 20:20

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I thought Michael Clark's overview is excellent: https://m-clark.github.io/generalized-additive-models/

A great short (very short) introduction to get you started.

edited Jan 27 '18 at 20:20

Michael R. Chernick

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answered Aug 14 '14 at 00:07

charles

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score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 14 '14 at 04:14

Hastie & Tibshirani's original textbook is still a great read IMO: Hastie, T. & Tibshirani, R. (1990) Generalized Additive Models, Chapman & Hall. I personally found it much easier to follow than Simon Wood's text, even if the latter is more up-to-date.

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 13 '14 at 20:41

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I came across this introductory video on GAM that I thought was helpful and easy to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXDYapfalt4

answered Aug 13 '14 at 20:41

ybeybe

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score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 23 '21 at 20:00

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Not a text but I found this to be a great resource for GAMs using R: https://noamross.github.io/gams-in-r-course/

It leads you through the nature of fitting a GAM without getting into the maths involved.

answered Jun 23 '21 at 20:00

Dylan S.

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Ira S · Answer 6 · 2015-04-12T23:37:57.517

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See chapter 3 in "Mixed effects models and extensions in ecology with R. A Zuur, EN Ieno, N Walker, AA Saveliev, GM Smith"

Ch3 provides a really basic intro to GAM in both the GAM and MGCV packages. In further chapters the book covers a lot of the things you might do with GAM and goes into GAMM, and zero-inflated GAM.

Its a great intro and also helpful for advanced applications.

edited Apr 12 '15 at 23:37

answered Nov 28 '14 at 17:37

Ira S

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Introductory Text for GAM

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