  Three independent techniques are used to separate fine structure from the
absorption spectra, the background function in which is approximated by (i)
smoothing spline. We propose a new reliable criterion for determination of
smoothing parameter and the method for raising of stability with respect to
k_min variation; (ii) interpolation spline with the varied knots; (iii) the
line obtained from bayesian smoothing. This methods considers various prior
information and includes a natural way to determine the errors of XAFS
extraction. Particular attention has been given to the estimation of
uncertainties in XAFS data. Experimental noise is shown to be essentially
smaller than the errors of the background approximation, and it is the latter
that determines the variances of structural parameters in subsequent fitting.

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability