Randomized least-squares with minimal oversampling and interpolation in general spaces

Abstract: In approximation of functions based on point values, least-squares methods provide more stability than interpolation, at the expense of increasing the sampling budget. We show that near-optimal approximation error can nevertheless be achieved, in an expected $L^2$ sense, as soon as the sample size $m$ is larger than the dimension $n$ of the approximation space by a constant ratio. On the other hand, for $m=n$, we obtain an interpolation strategy with a stability factor of order $n$. The proposed sampling algorithms are greedy procedures based on arXiv:0808.0163 and arXiv:1508.03261, with polynomial computational complexity.