On piecewise-linear basis functions and piecewise-linear signal expansions

A set of piecewise-linear (PL) basis functions for signal or functional decomposition is introduced. These basis functions provide a PL approximation to the signal and an a priori determination of the required number for a finite term expansion to achieve a certain pointwise approximation error. Moreover, the expansion coefficients are linear combinations of samples of the function to be expanded and are virtually trivial to determine.