Some Results on the Complexity of Numerical Integration

This is a survey (21 pages, 124 references) written for the MCQMC 2014 conference in Leuven, April 2014. We start with the seminal paper of Bakhvalov (1959) and end with new results on the curse of dimension and on the complexity of oscillatory integrals. Some small errors of earlier versions are corrected

Rank-1 lattice rules for multivariate integration in spaces of permutation-invariant functions: Error bounds and tractability

We study multivariate integration of functions that are invariant under permutations (of subsets) of their arguments. We find an upper bound for the $n$th minimal worst case error and show that under certain conditions, it can be bounded independent of the number of dimensions. In particular, we study the application of unshifted and randomly shifted rank-$1$ lattice rules in such a problem setting. We derive conditions under which multivariate integration is polynomially or strongly polynomially tractable with the Monte Carlo rate of convergence $O(n^{-1/2})$. Furthermore, we prove that those tractability results can be achieved with shifted lattice rules and that the shifts are indeed necessary. Finally, we show the existence of rank-$1$ lattice rules whose worst case error on the permutation- and shift-invariant spaces converge with (almost) optimal rate. That is, we derive error bounds of the form $O(n^{-\lambda/2})$ for all $1 \leq \lambda < 2 \alpha$, where $\alpha$ denotes the smoothness of the spaces. Keywords: Numerical integration, Quadrature, Cubature, Quasi-Monte Carlo methods, Rank-1 lattice rules.Comment: 26 pages; minor changes due to reviewer's comments; the final publication is available at link.springer.co

Recent advances in higher order quasi-Monte Carlo methods

In this article we review some of recent results on higher order quasi-Monte Carlo (HoQMC) methods. After a seminal work by Dick (2007, 2008) who originally introduced the concept of HoQMC, there have been significant theoretical progresses on HoQMC in terms of discrepancy as well as multivariate numerical integration. Moreover, several successful and promising applications of HoQMC to partial differential equations with random coefficients and Bayesian estimation/inversion problems have been reported recently. In this article we start with standard quasi-Monte Carlo methods based on digital nets and sequences in the sense of Niederreiter, and then move onto their higher order version due to Dick. The Walsh analysis of smooth functions plays a crucial role in developing the theory of HoQMC, and the aim of this article is to provide a unified picture on how the Walsh analysis enables recent developments of HoQMC both for discrepancy and numerical integration