The aim of this paper is to extend the approximate quasi-interpolation on a
uniform grid by dilated shifts of a smooth and rapidly decaying function on a
uniform grid to scattered data quasi-interpolation. It is shown that high order
approximation of smooth functions up to some prescribed accuracy is possible,
if the basis functions, which are centered at the scattered nodes, are
multiplied by suitable polynomials such that their sum is an approximate
partition of unity. For Gaussian functions we propose a method to construct the
approximate partition of unity and describe the application of the new
quasi-interpolation approach to the cubature of multi-dimensional integral
operators.Comment: 29 pages, 17 figure
