Smoothing out a curve

Question

I have two lists of data points:

list_x = [-10, -9, -8, -7, -6, -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49]
list_y = [1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]

When I plot them, the graph will look like this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(list_x, list_y)
plt.show()

Based on these datapoints, is there a way to make the graph that looks like the one below and get its graph equation?

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I have tried using the solution from here, and it produces a graph that is not smooth.

from scipy.interpolate import spline
import numpy as np

list_x_new = np.linspace(min(list_x), max(list_x), 1000)
list_y_smooth = spline(list_x, list_y, list_x_new)

plt.plot(list_x_new, list_y_smooth)
plt.show() 

Answer 1

One easy option that echoes the suggestion from Davis Herring would be to use a polynomial approximation for the data

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.figure()
poly = np.polyfit(list_x,list_y,5)
poly_y = np.poly1d(poly)(list_x)
plt.plot(list_x,poly_y)
plt.plot(list_x,list_y)
plt.show()

You would notice the oscillation at the right end of the plot that is not present in the original data which is an artifact of polynomial approximation.

Spline interpolation as suggested above by Davis is another good option. Varying the smoothness parameter s you can achieve different balance between smoothness and distance to the original data.

from scipy.interpolate import splrep, splev

plt.figure()
bspl = splrep(list_x,list_y,s=5)
bspl_y = splev(list_x,bspl)
plt.plot(list_x,list_y)
plt.plot(list_x,bspl_y)
plt.show()