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In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, spline interpolation is a form of interpolation where the interpolant is a special type of piecewise polynomial called a spline. That is, instead of fitting a single, high-degree polynomial to all of the values at once, spline interpolation fits low-degree polynomials to small subsets of the ...
In mathematics, a spline is a function defined piecewise by polynomials. In interpolating problems, spline interpolation is often preferred to polynomial interpolation because it yields similar results, even when using low degree polynomials, while avoiding Runge's phenomenon for higher degrees.
The original use of interpolation polynomials was to approximate values of important transcendental functions such as natural logarithm and trigonometric functions.Starting with a few accurately computed data points, the corresponding interpolation polynomial will approximate the function at an arbitrary nearby point.
Polyharmonic spline (the thin-plate-spline is a special case of a polyharmonic spline) Radial basis function (Polyharmonic splines are a special case of radial basis functions with low degree polynomial terms) Least-squares spline; Natural neighbour interpolation; Gridding is the process of converting irregularly spaced data to a regular grid ...
The simplest interpolation method is to locate the nearest data value, and assign the same value. In simple problems, this method is unlikely to be used, as linear interpolation (see below) is almost as easy, but in higher-dimensional multivariate interpolation, this could be a favourable choice for its speed and simplicity.
A better form of the interpolation polynomial for practical (or computational) purposes is the barycentric form of the Lagrange interpolation (see below) or Newton polynomials. Lagrange and other interpolation at equally spaced points, as in the example above, yield a polynomial oscillating above and below the true function.
Bicubic interpolation can be accomplished using either Lagrange polynomials, cubic splines, or cubic convolution algorithm. In image processing, bicubic interpolation is often chosen over bilinear or nearest-neighbor interpolation in image resampling, when speed is not an issue.
Low-order polynomials tend to be smooth and high order polynomial curves tend to be "lumpy". To define this more precisely, the maximum number of inflection points possible in a polynomial curve is n-2, where n is the order of the polynomial equation. An inflection point is a location on the curve where it switches from a positive radius to ...