Change default smooth in mgcv?

[ericward-noaa]

Right now the code is using thin plate splines with 'k' specified. The approach is described well here: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/486109/gams-specifying-knots-positions-for-thin-plate-regression-splines

It might be useful to modify this and change to something other than bs = "tp". Options could be "ps", "gp", etc. See here:

https://github.com/raine-detmer/Threshold-Detection/blob/5f6312e18c4b0c004b09ea739adb2cd1a2bdcf4e/functions/gamfun.R#L32

[ericward-noaa]

To this point, this could be another angle to explore -- which type of smooth is most effective at identifying thresholds in the kind of data we're working with