Polyharmonic Approximation on the Sphere

The purpose of this article is to provide new error estimates for a popular type of spherical basis function (SBF) approximation on the sphere: approximating by linear combinations of Green’s functions of polyharmonic differential operators. We show that the L _p approximation order for this kind of approximation is σ for functions having L _p smoothness σ (for σ up to the order of the underlying differential operator, just as in univariate spline theory). This improves previous error estimates, which penalized the approximation order when measuring error in L _p , p>2 and held only in a restrictive setting when measuring error in L _p , p<2.