Many problems on signal processing reduce to nonparametric function estimation. We propose a new methodology, piecewise convex fitting (PCF), and give a two-stage adaptive estimate. In the first stage, the number and location of the change points is estimated using strong smoothing. In the second stage, a constrained smoothing spline fit is performed with the smoothing level chosen to minimize the MSE. The imposed constraint is that a single change point occurs in a region about each empirical change point of the first-stage estimate. This constraint is equivalent to requiring that the third derivative of the second-stage estimate has a single sign in a small neighborhood about each first-stage change point. We sketch how PCF may be applied to signal recovery, instantaneous frequency estimation, surface reconstruction, image segmentation, spectral estimation and multivariate adaptive regression.

We determine the expected error by smoothing the data locally. Then we optimize the shape of the kernel smoother to minimize the error. Because the optimal estimator depends on the unknown function, our scheme automatically adjusts to the unknown function. By self-consistently adjusting the kernel smoother, the total estimator adapts to the data. Goodness of fit estimators select a kernel halfwidth by minimizing a function of the halfwidth which is based on the average square residual fit error: $ASR(h)$. A penalty term is included to adjust for using the same data to estimate the function and to evaluate the mean square error. Goodness of fit estimators are relatively simple to implement, but the minimum (of the goodness of fit functional) tends to be sensitive to small perturbations. To remedy this sensitivity problem, we fit the mean square error %goodness of fit functional to a two parameter model prior to determining the optimal halfwidth. Plug-in derivative estimators estimate the second derivative of the unknown function in an initial step, and then substitute this estimate into the asymptotic formula.