Fast evaluation of polyharmonic splines in three dimensions

M. J. D. Powell ^{This paper concerns the fast evaluation of radial basis functions.It describes the mathematics of hierarchical and fast multipolemethods for fast evaluation of splines of the form where is a positive integer andp is a low-degree polynomial. Splines s of this form are polyharmonicsplines in 3 and have been found to be very useful for providingsolutions to scattered data interpolation problems in 3. Asit is now well known, hierarchical methods reduce the incrementalcost of a single extra evaluation from O(N) to O(log N) operationsand reduce the cost of a matrix–vector product (evaluationof s at all the centres) from O(N2) to O(N log N) operations.We give appropriate far- and near-field expansions, togetherwith error estimates, uniqueness theorems and translation formulae.A hierarchical code based on these formulae is detailed andsome numerical results are given.}