Figure 2 Changes in mean swollen joint count and proportion of patients treated with methotrexate (MTX) over time. LOWESS is a data analysis technique for producing a “smooth” set of values from a time series that has been contaminated with noise, or from a scatter plot with a “noisy” relationship between the two variables. In a time series context, the technique is an improvement over least‐squares smoothing when the data are not equally spaced (as least‐squares smoothing assumes; http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/software/dataplot/refman1/ch3/lowess_s.pdf).