Acta Numerica (2000), pp. 1–38 c Cambridge University Press, 2000 Radial basis functions M. D. Buhmann Mathematical Institute, Justus Liebig University, 35392 Giessen, Germany E-mail:
[email protected] Radial basis function methods are modern ways to approximate multivariate functions, especially in the absence of grid data. They have been known, tested and analysed for several years now and many positive properties have been identified. This paper gives a selective but up-to-date survey of several recent developments that explains their usefulness from the theoretical point of view and contributes useful new classes of radial basis function. We consider particularly the new results on convergence rates of interpolation with radial basis functions, as well as some of the various achievements on approximation on spheres, and the efficient numerical computation of interpolants for very large sets of data. Several examples of useful applications are stated at the end of the paper. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Convergence rates 5 3 Compact support 11 4 Iterative methods for implementation 16 5 Interpolation on spheres 25 6 Applications 28 References 34 1. Introduction There is a multitude of ways to approximate a function of many variables: multivariate polynomials, splines, tensor product methods, local methods and global methods. All of these approaches have many advantages and some disadvantages, but if the dimensionality of the problem (the number of variables) is large, which is often the case in many applications from stat- istics to neural networks, our choice of methods is greatly reduced, unless 2 M. D. Buhmann we resort solely to tensor product methods.