On semiparametric regression with O'Sullivan penalised splines

This is an expos\'e on the use of O'Sullivan penalised splines in contemporary semiparametric regression, including mixed model and Bayesian formulations. O'Sullivan penalised splines are similar to P-splines, but have an advantage of being a direct generalisation of smoothing splines. Exact expressions for the O'Sullivan penalty matrix are obtained. Comparisons between the two reveals that O'Sullivan penalised splines more closely mimic the natural boundary behaviour of smoothing splines. Implementation in modern computing environments such as Matlab, R and BUGS is discussed.