On the optimal shape parameter for Gaussian radial basis function finite difference approximation of the Poisson equation

We investigate the influence of the shape parameter in the meshless Gaussian RBF finite difference method with irregular centres on the quality of the approximation of the Dirichlet problem for the Poisson equation with smooth solution. Numerical experiments show that the optimal shape parameter strongly depends on the problem, but insignificantly on the density of the centres. Therefore, we suggest a multilevel algorithm that effectively finds near-optimal shape parameter, which helps to significantly reduce the error. Comparison to the finite element method and to the generalised finite differences obtained in the flat limits of the Gaussian RBF is provided

Pricing Financial Derivatives using Radial Basis Function generated Finite Differences with Polyharmonic Splines on Smoothly Varying Node Layouts

In this paper, we study the benefits of using polyharmonic splines and node layouts with smoothly varying density for developing robust and efficient radial basis function generated finite difference (RBF-FD) methods for pricing of financial derivatives. We present a significantly improved RBF-FD scheme and successfully apply it to two types of multidimensional partial differential equations in finance: a two-asset European call basket option under the Black--Scholes--Merton model, and a European call option under the Heston model. We also show that the performance of the improved method is equally high when it comes to pricing American options. By studying convergence, computational performance, and conditioning of the discrete systems, we show the superiority of the introduced approaches over previously used versions of the RBF-FD method in financial applications

A least-squares implicit RBF-FD closest point method and applications to PDEs on moving surfaces

The closest point method (Ruuth and Merriman, J. Comput. Phys. 227(3):1943-1961, [2008]) is an embedding method developed to solve a variety of partial differential equations (PDEs) on smooth surfaces, using a closest point representation of the surface and standard Cartesian grid methods in the embedding space. Recently, a closest point method with explicit time-stepping was proposed that uses finite differences derived from radial basis functions (RBF-FD). Here, we propose a least-squares implicit formulation of the closest point method to impose the constant-along-normal extension of the solution on the surface into the embedding space. Our proposed method is particularly flexible with respect to the choice of the computational grid in the embedding space. In particular, we may compute over a computational tube that contains problematic nodes. This fact enables us to combine the proposed method with the grid based particle method (Leung and Zhao, J. Comput. Phys. 228(8):2993-3024, [2009]) to obtain a numerical method for approximating PDEs on moving surfaces. We present a number of examples to illustrate the numerical convergence properties of our proposed method. Experiments for advection-diffusion equations and Cahn-Hilliard equations that are strongly coupled to the velocity of the surface are also presented

Adaptive meshless centres and RBF stencils for Poisson equation

We consider adaptive meshless discretisation of the Dirichlet problem for Poisson equation based on numerical differentiation stencils obtained with the help of radial basis functions. New meshless stencil selection and adaptive refinement algorithms are proposed in 2D. Numerical experiments show that the accuracy of the solution is comparable with, and often better than that achieved by the mesh-based adaptive finite element method