On the density of polyharmonic splines

Abstract

This article treats the question of fundamentality of the translates of a polyharmonic spline kernel (also known as a surface spline) in the space of continuous functions on a compact set Ω⊂Rd when the translates are restricted to Ω. Fundamentality is not hard to demonstrate when a low degree polynomial may be added or when translates are permitted to lie outside of Ω; the challenge of this problem stems from the presence of the boundary, for which all successful approximation schemes require an added polynomial.When Ω is the unit ball, we demonstrate that translates of polyharmonic splines are fundamental by considering two related problems: the fundamentality in the space of functions vanishing at the boundary and fundamentality of the restricted kernel in the space of continuous functions on the sphere. This gives rise to a new approximation scheme composed of two parts: one which approximates purely on ∂Ω, and a second part involving a shift invariant approximant of a function vanishing outside of a neighborhood Ω.