Curvature-Based Characterization of Radial Basis Functions: Application to Interpolation

Choosing the scale or shape parameter of radial basis functions (RBFs) is a well-documented but still an open problem in kernel-based methods. It is common to tune it according to the applications, and it plays a crucial role both for the accuracy and stability of the method. In this paper, we first devise a direct relation between the shape parameter of RBFs and their curvature at each point. This leads to characterizing RBFs to scalable and unscalable ones. We prove that all scalable RBFs lie in the c12-class which means that their curvature at the point xj is proportional to c21, where cj is the corresponding spatially variable shape parameter at j xj. Some of the most commonly used RBFs are then characterized and classified accordingly to their curvature. Then, the fundamental theory of plane curves helps us recover univariate functions from scattered data, by enforcing the exact and approximate solutions have the same curvature at the point where they meet. This leads to introducing curvature-based scaled RBFs with shape parameters depending on the function values and approximate curvature values of the function to be approximated. Several numerical experiments are devoted to show that the method performs better than the standard fixed-scale basis and some other shape parameter selection methods.