Printed in Great Britain Bayesian information criteria and smoothing parameter

By extending Schwarz’s (1978) basic idea we derive a Bayesian information criterion which enables us to evaluate models estimated by the maximum penalised likelihood method or the method of regularisation. The proposed criterion is applied to the choice of smoothing parameters and the number of basis functions in radial basis function network models. Monte Carlo experiments were conducted to examine the performance of the nonlinear modelling strategy of estimating the weight parameters by regularisation and then determining the adjusted parameters by the Bayesian information criterion. The simulation results show that our modelling procedure performs well in various situations