70 research outputs found
Well posedness and Maximum Entropy Approximation for the Dynamics of Quantitative Traits
We study the Fokker-Planck equation derived in the large system limit of the
Markovian process describing the dynamics of quantitative traits. The
Fokker-Planck equation is posed on a bounded domain and its transport and
diffusion coefficients vanish on the domain's boundary. We first argue that,
despite this degeneracy, the standard no-flux boundary condition is valid. We
derive the weak formulation of the problem and prove the existence and
uniqueness of its solutions by constructing the corresponding contraction
semigroup on a suitable function space. Then, we prove that for the parameter
regime with high enough mutation rate the problem exhibits a positive spectral
gap, which implies exponential convergence to equilibrium.
Next, we provide a simple derivation of the so-called Dynamic Maximum Entropy
(DynMaxEnt) method for approximation of moments of the Fokker-Planck solution,
which can be interpreted as a nonlinear Galerkin approximation. The limited
applicability of the DynMaxEnt method inspires us to introduce its modified
version that is valid for the whole range of admissible parameters. Finally, we
present several numerical experiments to demonstrate the performance of both
the original and modified DynMaxEnt methods. We observe that in the parameter
regimes where both methods are valid, the modified one exhibits slightly better
approximation properties compared to the original one.Comment: 28 pages, 4 tables, 5 figure
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