The role of inner summaries in the fast evaluation of thin-plate splines (Q2392722)

The approximation and interpolation with radial basis functions and in particular with thin-plate splines finds much attention in literature and applications; a particular aspect of it which must be carefully considered is the application of suitable methods for its computation and evaluation. Fast multipole methods with so-called outer sums are highly useful for this as they collect and simultaneously evaluate several terms grouped together and therefore make fast evaluation possible, in spite of the nontrivial and off-hand nonlocal form of these radial basis functions. Together with the mentioned outer sums, the author now offers a careful analysis and numerical presentation of local, inner summaries which add up to the efficient computational methods to make them even better. Both constructions of such inner summaries and computational examples are explained in the paper.