Detector response to a high-energy physics process is often estimated by Monte Carlo simulation. For purposes of data analysis, the results of this simulation are typically stored in large multi-dimensional histograms, which can quickly become both t
oo large to easily store and manipulate and numerically problematic due to unfilled bins or interpolation artifacts. We describe here an application of the penalized spline technique to efficiently compute B-spline representations of such tables and discuss aspects of the resulting B-spline fits that simplify many common tasks in handling tabulated Monte Carlo data in high-energy physics analysis, in particular their use in maximum-likelihood fitting.
