plotting a natural cubic spline
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Hello, im a bit confused on how to approach this problem im supposed to find and plot the cubic spline S satisfying S(0) = 1,S(1) = 3,S(2) = 3,S(3) = 4,S(4) = 2 and with S''(0) = S''(4) = 0.
2 Comments
darova
on 24 Mar 2020
What does S(0) mean? Can you make a simple drawing? DO you have a picture or something?
Answers (2)
John D'Errico
on 24 Mar 2020
Edited: John D'Errico
on 24 Mar 2020
Are you allowed to use existing code? So if you have the curve fitting toolbox, you can just use csape.
x = 0:4;
y = [1 3 3 4 2];
spl = csape(x,y,'variational')
spl =
struct with fields:
form: 'pp'
breaks: [0 1 2 3 4]
coefs: [4×4 double]
pieces: 4
order: 4
dim: 1
fnplt(fnder(spl,2))
yline(0);
![](https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/279108/image.jpeg)
As you can see, the second derivative as plotted is zero at the ends, and the second derivative curve is piecewise linear. So csape did as was needed, producing a natural cubic spline interpolant.
Plotting the plsine is pretty easy too.
fnplt(spl)
hold on
plot(x,y,'ro')
![](https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/279109/image.jpeg)
However, I would not be remotely surprised if your question is to actually formulate the equations and then solve for the spline yourself. After all, this is surely homework. So is that your need? (I'm not at all sure why you would be doing this for any other purpose than homework.)
If your need is to formulate the plsine completely from scratch, then my hope is you are not asking someone to do that part for you. It is easy enough to do anyway. Start by reading here:
4 Comments
Robert U
on 24 Mar 2020
Hi Justin Howard,
I guess there is a mistake concerning the second derivative at the start and end points of the requested spline interpolation. Usually just the slope is given which would be denoted S'.
You can use the function spline() to provide a cubic spline interpolation of the given points including the slopes at start and end points.
x = [0,1,2,3,4];
y = [0,1,3,3,4,2,0];
x_spline = 0:0.1:4;
y_spline = spline(x,y,x_spline);
fh = figure;
ah = axes(fh);
hold(ah,'on')
plot(ah,x,y(2:end-1),'o');
plot(ah,x_spline,y_spline)
Kind regards,
Robert
2 Comments
John D'Errico
on 24 Mar 2020
Robert - actually, this is a request for a NATURAL cubic spline. This is the case where the SECOND derivative is forced to zero at each end point, not the first derivative. Here the name natural probably arises from the calculus of variations, where the name natural end conditions are exactly as indicated.
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