  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 too 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.
