Fitting smooth paths to spherical data. (English) Zbl 0613.62086

Jupp, Peter E.; Kent, John T.

J. R. Stat. Soc., Ser. C 36, 34-46 (1987).

Given a set of data points on the sphere at known times, one often wishes to fit a smooth path to the data. In this paper we propose a unified approach to deal with such problems. Our method can be described as ”unwrapping” the data onto the plane, where standard curve fitting techniques can then be applied. As an important example of our approach, we define and fit ”spherical spline functions”.

MSC:

62H99	Multivariate analysis
62-07	Data analysis (statistics) (MSC2010)
65D10	Numerical smoothing, curve fitting
65C99	Probabilistic methods, stochastic differential equations

Keywords:

smoothing spline; unrolling; algorithm; two-sample curve fitting; unwrapping; spherical spline functions