Research

Paper

TESTING March 11, 2026

Exact Interpolation under Noise: A Reproducible Comparison of Clough-Tocher and Multiquadric RBF Surfaces

Authors

Mirkan Emir Sancak

Abstract

This paper presents a reproducible comparison of cubic and radial basis function (RBF) interpolants for multivariate surface analysis. To eliminate evaluation bias, both methods are assessed under a unified slice-wise train/test protocol on the same synthetic function family. Performance is reported using RMSE, MAE, and $R^2$ in two regimes: (i) noise-free observations and (ii) noisy observations. In the noise-free regime, both interpolants achieve high accuracy with output-dependent advantages. In the noisy regime, exact interpolation overfits noisy nodes and degrades out-of-sample performance for both methods; in our experimental setting, the cubic interpolant is comparatively more stable. All experiments are fully reproducible through a single SciPy/NumPy-based script with a fixed random seed, repeated splits, and bootstrap-based uncertainty summaries. From an environmental engineering perspective, the main practical implication is that noisy or apparently inconsistent measurements in thermodynamic process systems should not be discarded by default; instead, they can be structured and interpolated to recover physically meaningful process behavior.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.10590
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cs.GR
Published: 2026-03-11
Fetched: 2026-03-12 04:21

Related papers

Raw Data (Debug)
{
  "raw_xml": "<entry>\n    <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10590v1</id>\n    <title>Exact Interpolation under Noise: A Reproducible Comparison of Clough-Tocher and Multiquadric RBF Surfaces</title>\n    <updated>2026-03-11T09:46:30Z</updated>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10590v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10590v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n    <summary>This paper presents a reproducible comparison of cubic and radial basis function (RBF) interpolants for multivariate surface analysis. To eliminate evaluation bias, both methods are assessed under a unified slice-wise train/test protocol on the same synthetic function family. Performance is reported using RMSE, MAE, and $R^2$ in two regimes: (i) noise-free observations and (ii) noisy observations. In the noise-free regime, both interpolants achieve high accuracy with output-dependent advantages. In the noisy regime, exact interpolation overfits noisy nodes and degrades out-of-sample performance for both methods; in our experimental setting, the cubic interpolant is comparatively more stable. All experiments are fully reproducible through a single SciPy/NumPy-based script with a fixed random seed, repeated splits, and bootstrap-based uncertainty summaries. From an environmental engineering perspective, the main practical implication is that noisy or apparently inconsistent measurements in thermodynamic process systems should not be discarded by default; instead, they can be structured and interpolated to recover physically meaningful process behavior.</summary>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.GR'/>\n    <published>2026-03-11T09:46:30Z</published>\n    <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.GR'/>\n    <author>\n      <name>Mirkan Emir Sancak</name>\n    </author>\n  </entry>"
}