Marsden identity

The Marsden identity expands $(x-t{)}^{k-1}$ in a B-spline basis with knot-polynomial coefficients.

For order $k$ B-splines, comparison of coefficients in the Marsden identity giveson the basic knot interval. Here $e_m$ is the elementary symmetric polynomial, with $e_0=1$. The $m=0$ case is partition of unity; the $m=1$ coefficients are the Greville abscissae.

For an order-$k$ B-spline with $k\ge 2$, its Greville abscissa is the arithmetic mean of its $k-1$ interior knots. These are precisely the coefficients reproducing the linear function in the monomial B-spline coefficients formula. The irregular plural is Greville abscissae.

For an open clamped spline knot sequence and degree $d\ge 1$, the Greville abscissae ${\xi }_i=d^{-1}{\sum }_{r=1}^d{t}_{i+r}$ reproduce the parameter. The B-spline differentiation formula gives derivative coefficients $d({\xi }_i-{\xi }_{i-1})/(t_{i+d}-t_i)=1$. Their lower-degree partition of unity makes the derivative of the weighted sum equal to one. The left endpoint value is the left parameter endpoint, fixing the integration constant to zero. This proves linear precision even with unequal knot intervals.

The Marsden dual functionals extract coefficients in a B-spline expansion. If ${\psi }_i$ is the knot polynomial in the Marsden identity, then on polynomials of degree at most $k-1$ one such functional isand the right-hand side is independent of $x$.

This linear functional extracts one coefficient of a B-spline expansion using local polynomial data. With ${\psi }_i(x)={\prod }_{\ell =1}^{k-1}(x-t_{i+\ell })/(k-1)!$ and a point $\xi$ inside a knot cell in the support, it is ${\sum }_{r=0}^{k-1}(-1{)}^r{s}^{(r)}(\xi ){\psi }_i^{(k-1-r)}(\xi )$. The local polynomial identity for the Marsden dual functional gives the desired coefficient. Its bounded restriction to the local spline space can be extended to continuous data on $[t_i,t_{i+k}]$ by the Hahn-Banach theorem, with the same bound. Such extensions supply spline quasi-interpolation coefficients without requiring derivatives of the data.

When the knot polynomial is normalized as ${\psi }_i(x)={\prod }_{\ell =1}^{k-1}(x-t_{i+\ell })/(k-1)!$, the displayed formula has no additional factorial prefactor. Applied to Marsden's identity, it extracts the coefficient of the corresponding B-spline in any polynomial of degree at most $k-1$. Differentiating the finite sum makes adjacent terms cancel, proving independence of $x$. For linear polynomials the coefficient is their value at the Greville abscissa.