Originally, spline was a term for elasticrulers that were bent to pass through a number of predefined points ("knots"). These were used to make technical drawings for shipbuilding and construction by hand, as illustrated by Figure 1.
Figure 1: Interpolation with cubic splines between eight points. Hand-drawn technical drawings were made for shipbuilding etc. using flexible rulers that were bent to follow pre-defined points
The approach to mathematically modelling the shape of such elastic rulers fixed by n + 1 knots is to interpolate between all the pairs of knots and with polynomials .
As the spline will take a shape that minimizes the bending (under the constraint of passing through all knots) both and will be continuous everywhere and at the knots. To achieve this one must have that
This can only be achieved if polynomials of degree 3 or higher are used. The classical approach is to use polynomials of degree 3 — the case of cubic splines.
Algorithm to find the interpolating cubic spline
A third-order polynomial for which
can be written in the symmetrical form
(1)
where
(2)
(3)
(4)
As
one gets that:
(5)
(6)
Setting t = 0 and t = 1 respectively in equations (5) and (6) one gets from (2) that indeed first derivatives q′(x1) = k1 and q′(x2) = k2 and also second derivatives
(7)
(8)
If now (xi, yi), i = 0, 1, ..., n are n + 1 points and
(9)
where i = 1, 2, ..., n and are n third degree polynomials interpolating y in the interval xi−1 ≤ x ≤ xi for i = 1, ..., n such that q′i (xi) = q′i+1(xi) for i = 1, ..., n−1 then the n polynomials together define a differentiable function in the interval x0 ≤ x ≤ xn and
(10)
(11)
for i = 1, ..., n where
(12)
(13)
(14)
If the sequence k0, k1, ..., kn is such that, in addition, q′′i(xi) = q′′i+1(xi) holds for i = 1, ..., n-1, then the resulting function will even have a continuous second derivative.
From (7), (8), (10) and (11) follows that this is the case if and only if
(15)
for i = 1, ..., n-1. The relations (15) are n − 1 linear equations for the n + 1 values k0, k1, ..., kn.
For the elastic rulers being the model for the spline interpolation one has that to the left of the left-most "knot" and to the right of the right-most "knot" the ruler can move freely and will therefore take the form of a straight line with q′′ = 0. As q′′ should be a continuous function of x one gets that for "Natural Splines" one in addition to the n − 1 linear equations (15) should have that
i.e. that
(16)
(17)
Eventually, (15) together with (16) and (17) constitute n + 1 linear equations that uniquely define the n + 1 parameters k0, k1, ..., kn.
There exist other end conditions: "Clamped spline", that specifies the slope at the ends of the spline, and the popular "not-a-knot spline", that requires that the third derivative is also continuous at the x1 and xN−1 points.
For the "not-a-knot" spline, the additional equations will read:
where .
Example
Figure 2: Interpolation with cubic "natural" splines between three points.