Hi! I’m wonder if smoothing/convolving a signal with a window function is similar to filtering out higher frequency components like using a low pass filter. I think they are likely quite different but I am wondering in what ways
It depends on how you define your low pass filter. If your low pass filter have the coefficients with 1/N values considering N as the number of the samples in a window, they are the same. All in all they are working as a low pass filter since both removing the high frequency contents of the signal.