AbstractThe main purpose of this work is to provide an efficient scheme for constructing kernel-based reduced interpolation models. In the existing literature such problems are mainly addressed via the well-establishedknot insertionorknot removalschemes. Such iterative strategies are usually quite demanding from a computational point of view and our goal is to study an efficient implementation for data removal approaches, namely efficient reduced basis algorithm (ERBA). Focusing on kernel-based interpolation, the algorithm makes use of two iterative rules for removing data. The former, called ERBA-r, is based on classical residual evaluations. The latter, namely ERBA-p, is independent of the function values and relies on error bounds defined by the power function. In both cases, inspired by the so-called extended Rippa’s algorithm, our ERBA takes advantage of a fast implementation.