  This paper is devoted to the application of B-splines to volatility modeling,
specifically the calibration of the leverage function in stochastic local
volatility models and the parameterization of an arbitrage-free implied
volatility surface calibrated to sparse option data. We use an extension of
classical B-splines obtained by including basis functions with infinite
support. We first come back to the application of shape-constrained B-splines
to the estimation of conditional expectations, not merely from a scatter plot
but also from the given marginal distributions. An application is the Monte
Carlo calibration of stochastic local volatility models by Markov projection.
Then we present a new technique for the calibration of an implied volatility
surface to sparse option data. We use a B-spline parameterization of the
Radon-Nikodym derivative of the underlying's risk-neutral probability density
with respect to a roughly calibrated base model. We show that this method
provides smooth arbitrage-free implied volatility surfaces. Finally, we sketch
a Galerkin method with B-spline finite elements to the solution of the partial
differential equation satisfied by the Radon-Nikodym derivative.
