The paper considers causal smoothing of the real sequences, i.e.,discrete
time processes in a deterministic setting. A family of causal linear
time-invariant filters is suggested. These filters approximate the gain decay
for some non-causal smoothing filters with transfer functions vanishing at a
point of the unit circle and such that they transfer processes into predictable
ones. In this sense, the suggested filters are near-ideal; a faster gain decay
would lead to the loss of causality. Applications to predicting algorithms are
discussed and illustrated by experiments with forecasting of autoregressions
with the coefficients that are deemed to be untraceable