Compactly supported radial basis functions as probability density functions

Abstract

Compactly Supported Radial Basis Functions (CS-RBFs) are a fundamental tool in multivariate approximation theory. However, their use in statistics and probability modeling remains underexplored, having been used mainly to express covariance functions in Gaussian processes or as kernel functions. This work explores CS-RBFs as a novel parametric family of probability density functions, focusing in particular on Wendland $\mathscr{C}^2$ kernels. The primary contribution of this work is the derivation of analytical expressions for various statistical properties, such as moments and the cumulative distribution function, of CS-RBFs as univariate and conditional densities. The approach comprises two alternative scenarios: when the CS-RBF support lies entirely within the variable's domain (untruncated support) and when part of it is outside (truncated support). Mixture models employing CS-RBFs are also analyzed, and their main properties are detailed. Furthermore, we introduce an incremental learning algorithm for density estimation with CS-RBF mixture models, in which centers are determined using k-means and weights and shape parameters are optimized by stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that CS-RBF densities provide competitive results in terms of likelihood and model complexity in comparison with Gaussian mixture models. In addition, these CS-RBF densities allow the exact computation of key distributional properties in univariate and conditional settings.