The use of prior information for extracting the post-edge background

A new method for extracting the post-edge background µ₀ is proposed, the method of Bayesian smoothing. A further evolution of the smoothing spline method is considered as well. Both techniques are capable to take into account prior information about the peculiarities on the µ₀. In addition, since the Bayesian approach works in terms of the posterior probability density functions, it contains a natural way to determine the errors of the µ₀ construction, which has always been an unresolvable problem for any other method. Even with use of the prior information, which narrows the posterior probabilities, the errors of µ₀ are shown to be larger than the experimental noise.