The long-term distributions of trajectories of a flow are described by
invariant densities, i.e. fixed points of an associated transfer operator. In
addition, global slowly mixing structures, such as almost-invariant sets, which
partition phase space into regions that are almost dynamically disconnected,
can also be identified by certain eigenfunctions of this operator. Indeed,
these structures are often hard to obtain by brute-force trajectory-based
analyses. In a wide variety of applications, transfer operators have proven to
be very efficient tools for an analysis of the global behavior of a dynamical
system.
The computationally most expensive step in the construction of an approximate
transfer operator is the numerical integration of many short term trajectories.
In this paper, we propose to directly work with the infinitesimal generator
instead of the operator, completely avoiding trajectory integration. We propose
two different discretization schemes; a cell based discretization and a
spectral collocation approach. Convergence can be shown in certain
circumstances. We demonstrate numerically that our approach is much more
efficient than the operator approach, sometimes by several orders of magnitude