The capability of approximation for neural networks interpolant on the sphere

Compared with planar hyperplane, fitting data on the sphere has been an important and active issue in geoscience, metrology, brain imaging, and so on. In this paper, using a functional approach, we rigorously prove that for given distinct samples on the unit sphere there exists a feed‐forward neural network with single hidden layer which can interpolate the samples, and simultaneously near best approximate the target function in continuous function space. Also, by using the relation between spherical positive definite radial basis functions and the basis function on the Euclidean space ?^{d + 1}, a similar result in a spherical Sobolev space is established. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.