Hot new directions for quasi-Monte Carlo research in step with applications

This article provides an overview of some interfaces between the theory of quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods and applications. We summarize three QMC theoretical settings: first order QMC methods in the unit cube $[0,1]^s$ and in $\mathbb{R}^s$, and higher order QMC methods in the unit cube. One important feature is that their error bounds can be independent of the dimension $s$ under appropriate conditions on the function spaces. Another important feature is that good parameters for these QMC methods can be obtained by fast efficient algorithms even when $s$ is large. We outline three different applications and explain how they can tap into the different QMC theory. We also discuss three cost saving strategies that can be combined with QMC in these applications. Many of these recent QMC theory and methods are developed not in isolation, but in close connection with applications

Sparse-grid polynomial interpolation approximation and integration for parametric and stochastic elliptic PDEs with lognormal inputs

By combining a certain approximation property in the spatial domain, and weighted $\ell_2$-summability of the Hermite polynomial expansion coefficients in the parametric domain obtained in [M. Bachmayr, A. Cohen, R. DeVore and G. Migliorati, ESAIM Math. Model. Numer. Anal. $\bf 51$(2017), 341-363] and [M. Bachmayr, A. Cohen, D. D\~ung and C. Schwab, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. $\bf 55$(2017), 2151-2186], we investigate linear non-adaptive methods of fully discrete polynomial interpolation approximation as well as fully discrete weighted quadrature methods of integration for parametric and stochastic elliptic PDEs with lognormal inputs. We explicitly construct such methods and prove corresponding convergence rates in $n$ of the approximations by them, where $n$ is a number characterizing computation complexity. The linear non-adaptive methods of fully discrete polynomial interpolation approximation are sparse-grid collocation methods. Moreover, they generate in a natural way discrete weighted quadrature formulas for integration of the solution to parametric and stochastic elliptic PDEs and its linear functionals, and the error of the corresponding integration can be estimated via the error in the Bochner space $L_1({\mathbb R}^\infty,V,\gamma)$ norm of the generating methods where $\gamma$ is the Gaussian probability measure on ${\mathbb R}^\infty$ and $V$ is the energy space. We also briefly consider similar problems for parametric and stochastic elliptic PDEs with affine inputs, and by-product problems of non-fully discrete polynomial interpolation approximation and integration. In particular, the convergence rate of non-fully discrete obtained in this paper improves the known one

MDFEM: Multivariate decomposition finite element method for elliptic PDEs with lognormal diffusion coefficients using higher-order QMC and FEM

We introduce the multivariate decomposition finite element method for elliptic PDEs with lognormal diffusion coefficient $a=\exp(Z)$ where $Z$ is a Gaussian random field defined by an infinite series expansion $Z(\boldsymbol{y}) = \sum_{j \ge 1} y_j \, \phi_j$ with $y_j \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1)$ and a given sequence of functions $\{\phi_j\}_{j \ge 1}$. We use the MDFEM to approximate the expected value of a linear functional of the solution of the PDE which is an infinite-dimensional integral over the parameter space. The proposed algorithm uses the multivariate decomposition method to compute the infinite-dimensional integral by a decomposition into finite-dimensional integrals, which we resolve using quasi-Monte Carlo methods, and for which we use the finite element method to solve different instances of the PDE. We develop higher-order quasi-Monte Carlo rules for integration over the finite-dimensional Euclidean space with respect to the Gaussian distribution by use of a truncation strategy. By linear transformations of interlaced polynomial lattice rules from the unit cube to a multivariate box of the Euclidean space we achieve higher-order convergence rates for functions belonging to a class of anchored Gaussian Sobolev spaces while taking into account the truncation error. Under appropriate conditions, the MDFEM achieves higher-order convergence rates in term of error versus cost, i.e., to achieve an accuracy of $O(\epsilon)$ the computational cost is $O(\epsilon^{-1/\lambda-d'/\lambda}) = O(\epsilon^{-(p^* + d'/\tau)/(1-p^*)})$ where $\epsilon^{-1/\lambda}$ and $\epsilon^{-d'/\lambda}$ are respectively the cost of the quasi-Monte Carlo cubature and the finite element approximations, with $d' = d \, (1+\delta')$ for some $\delta' \ge 0$ and $d$ the physical dimension, and $0 < p^* \le (2 + d'/\tau)^{-1}$ is a parameter representing the sparsity of $\{\phi_j\}_{j \ge 1}$.Comment: 48 page