Overview and construction of meshfree basis functions: from moving least squares to entropy approximants

In this paper, an overview of the construction of meshfree basis functions is presented, with particular emphasis on moving least‐squares approximants, natural neighbour‐based polygonal interpolants, and entropy approximants. The use of information‐theoretic variational principles to derive approximation schemes is a recent development. In this setting, data approximation is viewed as an inductive inference problem, with the basis functions being synonymous with a discrete probability distribution and the polynomial reproducing conditions acting as the linear constraints. The maximization (minimization) of the Shannon–Jaynes entropy functional (relative entropy functional) is used to unify the construction of globally and locally supported convex approximation schemes. A JAVA applet is used to visualize the meshfree basis functions, and comparisons and links between different meshfree approximation schemes are presented.