Choosing Basis Functions and Shape Parameters for Radial Basis Function Methods

Radial basis function (RBF) methods have broad applications in numerical analysis and statistics. They have found uses in the numerical solution of PDEs, data mining, machine learning, and kriging methods in statistics. This work examines the use of radial basis functions in scattered data approximation. In particular, the experiments in this paper test the properties of shape parameters in RBF methods, as well as methods for finding an optimal shape parameter. Locating an optimal shape parameter is a difficult problem and a topic of current research. Some experiments also consider whether the same methods can be applied to the more general problem of selecting basis functions.