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

Tractability of multivariate analytic problems

In the theory of tractability of multivariate problems one usually studies problems with finite smoothness. Then we want to know which $s$-variate problems can be approximated to within $\varepsilon$ by using, say, polynomially many in $s$ and $\varepsilon^{-1}$ function values or arbitrary linear functionals. There is a recent stream of work for multivariate analytic problems for which we want to answer the usual tractability questions with $\varepsilon^{-1}$ replaced by $1+\log \varepsilon^{-1}$. In this vein of research, multivariate integration and approximation have been studied over Korobov spaces with exponentially fast decaying Fourier coefficients. This is work of J. Dick, G. Larcher, and the authors. There is a natural need to analyze more general analytic problems defined over more general spaces and obtain tractability results in terms of $s$ and $1+\log \varepsilon^{-1}$. The goal of this paper is to survey the existing results, present some new results, and propose further questions for the study of tractability of multivariate analytic questions

Lattice rules with random nn achieve nearly the optimal O(n−α−1/2)\mathcal{O}(n^{-\alpha-1/2}) error independently of the dimension

We analyze a new random algorithm for numerical integration of $d$-variate functions over $[0,1]^d$ from a weighted Sobolev space with dominating mixed smoothness $\alpha\ge 0$ and product weights $1\ge\gamma_1\ge\gamma_2\ge\cdots>0$, where the functions are continuous and periodic when $\alpha>1/2$. The algorithm is based on rank-$1$ lattice rules with a random number of points~$n$. For the case $\alpha>1/2$, we prove that the algorithm achieves almost the optimal order of convergence of $\mathcal{O}(n^{-\alpha-1/2})$, where the implied constant is independent of the dimension~$d$ if the weights satisfy $\sum_{j=1}^\infty \gamma_j^{1/\alpha}<\infty$. The same rate of convergence holds for the more general case $\alpha>0$ by adding a random shift to the lattice rule with random $n$. This shows, in particular, that the exponent of strong tractability in the randomized setting equals $1/(\alpha+1/2)$, if the weights decay fast enough. We obtain a lower bound to indicate that our results are essentially optimal. This paper is a significant advancement over previous related works with respect to the potential for implementation and the independence of error bounds on the problem dimension. Other known algorithms which achieve the optimal error bounds, such as those based on Frolov's method, are very difficult to implement especially in high dimensions. Here we adapt a lesser-known randomization technique introduced by Bakhvalov in 1961. This algorithm is based on rank-$1$ lattice rules which are very easy to implement given the integer generating vectors. A simple probabilistic approach can be used to obtain suitable generating vectors.Comment: 17 page

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