Natural Cubic Spline interpolation

How do you get the equation of the spline from matlab? The code successfully graphs the cubic spline given my points, but I need the actual equation for the function of the spline for further calculations. Thank you.

clear; clc;
x=[0,3,6,9,12,15,18,21];
y=[22.7,22.1,19.5,14.0,9.6,6.8,5.3,5];
N = length(x); %number of points 
n =N -1; % nmber of subintervals 

h = (x(N)-x(1))/n;
Trid = diag(4*ones(1,n-1))+ diag(ones(1,n-2),1)+diag(ones(1,n-2),-1);

for  i = 1:n-1
    z(i) = 6/h^2*(y(i+2)-2*y(i+1)+y(i));
end

z = z';
w = inv(Trid)*z;
sigma = [0; w; 0];

for i = 1:n
    d(i) = y(i);
    b(i) = sigma(i)/2;
    a(i) = (sigma(i+1)-sigma(i))/(6*h);
    c(i) = (y(i+1)-y(i))/h-h/6*(2*sigma(i)+sigma(i+1));
end

r = 4; %number of subsubintervals
hh = h/r; %step size of subsubintervals

m=x(1): hh:x(N);

for i =1:n
    for j = r* (i-1)+1:r*i
        s(j) = a(i)* (m(j)-x(i))^3+b(i)*(m(j)-x(i))^2+c(i)*(m(j)-x(i))+ d(i);
    end
end

s(r*n+1) =y(N);

plot(x, y, 'o')
hold on
plot(m,s,'-x')
hold off

Answer 1

[David Goodmanson]

Hi Bella,

you can get the coefficients of the piecewise polynomials for each segment with

pp = interp1(x,y,'spline','pp')

or with the spline function

pp = spline(x,y)

Note that each polynomial is 'local', i.e. if the span is from x_n to x_n+1, then pp is a polynomial in (x-x_n).