US defence expenditure
This diagram illustrates lowess smoothing and shows that it can be used to give fitted values up to the end of the series.
Click on any point to see the 'window' of adjacent values to which a least squares line is fitted, resulting in a smoothed fitted value at that point. Drag to see how this window and the resulting smooth fitted value changes.
Adjust the window width and repeat. A window width of 5 or 7 works well.
The data set gives the investment in defence in the USA between 1947 and 2006, with all values reported in '2000 dollars'.