I don't disagree, but I do not think it's meaningful to call something optimal if it is clearly unusable under certain circumstances. If you know that some rel

I don't disagree, but I do not think it's meaningful to call something optimal if it is clearly unusable under certain circumstances. If you know that some relationship is close to polynomial, obviously a polynomial basis is more suitable. E.g. a line performs terribly for a Fourier transformation. >Using high powers for polynomial basis is almost always worse than any other choice. For some value of "high", yes.