In this paper we study the numerical method for approximating the random periodic solution of semiliear stochastic evolution equations. The main challenge lies in proving a convergence over an infinite time horizon while simulating infinite-dimensional objects. We first show the existence and uniqueness of the random periodic solution to the equation as the limit of the pull-back flows of the equation, and observe that its mild form is well-defined in the intersection of a family of decreasing Hilbert spaces. Then we propose a Galerkin-type exponential integrator scheme and establish its convergence rate of the strong error to the mild solution, where the order of convergence directly depends on the space (among the family of Hilbert spaces) for the initial point to live. We finally conclude with the best order of convergence that is arbitrarily close to 0.5.
We study the stochastic $p$-Laplace system in a bounded domain. We propose two new space-time discretizations based on the approximation of time-averaged values. We establish linear convergence in space and $1/2$ convergence in time. Additionally, we provide a sampling algorithm to construct the necessary random input in an efficient way. The theoretical error analysis is complemented by numerical experiments.
We extend the Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) introduced in Sirignano and Spiliopoulos (2018)} to solve a number of partial differential equations (PDEs) that arise in the context of optimal stochastic control and mean field games. First, we consider PDEs where the function is constrained to be positive and integrate to unity, as is the case with Fokker-Planck equations. Our approach involves reparameterizing the solution as the exponential of a neural network appropriately normalized to ensure both requirements are satisfied. This then gives rise to nonlinear a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) where the integral appearing in the equation is handled by a novel application of importance sampling. Secondly, we tackle a number of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations that appear in stochastic optimal control problems. The key contribution is that these equations are approached in their unsimplified primal form which includes an optimization problem as part of the equation. We extend the DGM algorithm to solve for the value function and the optimal control \simultaneously by characterizing both as deep neural networks. Training the networks is performed by taking alternating stochastic gradient descent steps for the two functions, a technique inspired by the policy improvement algorithms (PIA).
We study the decentralized consensus and stochastic optimization problems with compressed communications over static directed graphs. We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm that compresses messages according to a desired compression ratio. The proposed method provably reduces the communication overhead on the network at every communication round. Contrary to existing literature, we allow for arbitrary compression ratios in the communicated messages. We show a linear convergence rate for the proposed method on the consensus problem. Moreover, we provide explicit convergence rates for decentralized stochastic optimization problems on smooth functions that are either (i) strongly convex, (ii) convex, or (iii) non-convex. Finally, we provide numerical experiments to illustrate convergence under arbitrary compression ratios and the communication efficiency of our algorithm.
Existing inferential methods for small area data involve a trade-off between maintaining area-level frequentist coverage rates and improving inferential precision via the incorporation of indirect information. In this article, we propose a method to obtain an area-level prediction region for a future observation which mitigates this trade-off. The proposed method takes a conformal prediction approach in which the conformity measure is the posterior predictive density of a working model that incorporates indirect information. The resulting prediction region has guaranteed frequentist coverage regardless of the working model, and, if the working model assumptions are accurate, the region has minimum expected volume compared to other regions with the same coverage rate. When constructed under a normal working model, we prove such a prediction region is an interval and construct an efficient algorithm to obtain the exact interval. We illustrate the performance of our method through simulation studies and an application to EPA radon survey data.
We study the numerical approximation by space-time finite element methods of a multi-physics system coupling hyperbolic elastodynamics with parabolic transport and modelling poro- and thermoelasticity. The equations are rewritten as a first-order system in time. Discretizations by continuous Galerkin methods in space and time with inf-sup stable pairs of finite elements for the spatial approximation of the unknowns are investigated. Optimal order error estimates of energy-type are proven. Superconvergence at the time nodes is addressed briefly. The error analysis can be extended to discontinuous and enriched Galerkin space discretizations. The error estimates are confirmed by numerical experiments.
Multigrid is a powerful solver for large-scale linear systems arising from discretized partial differential equations. The convergence theory of multigrid methods for symmetric positive definite problems has been well developed over the past decades, while, for nonsymmetric problems, such theory is still not mature. As a foundation for multigrid analysis, two-grid convergence theory plays an important role in motivating multigrid algorithms. Regarding two-grid methods for nonsymmetric problems, most previous works focus on the spectral radius of iteration matrix or rely on convergence measures that are typically difficult to compute in practice. Moreover, the existing results are confined to two-grid methods with exact solution of the coarse-grid system. In this paper, we analyze the convergence of a two-grid method for nonsymmetric positive definite problems (e.g., linear systems arising from the discretizations of convection-diffusion equations). In the case of exact coarse solver, we establish an elegant identity for characterizing two-grid convergence factor, which is measured by a smoother-induced norm. The identity can be conveniently used to derive a class of optimal restriction operators and analyze how the convergence factor is influenced by restriction. More generally, we present some convergence estimates for an inexact variant of the two-grid method, in which both linear and nonlinear coarse solvers are considered.
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have nowadays gained particular attention. In this paper, we study two variants of this kind, namely, the Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Langevin Dynamics and the Stochastic Recursive Gradient Langevin Dynamics. We prove their convergence to the objective distribution in terms of KL-divergence under the sole assumptions of smoothness and Log-Sobolev inequality which are weaker conditions than those used in prior works for these algorithms. With the batch size and the inner loop length set to $\sqrt{n}$, the gradient complexity to achieve an $\epsilon$-precision is $\tilde{O}((n+dn^{1/2}\epsilon^{-1})\gamma^2 L^2\alpha^{-2})$, which is an improvement from any previous analyses. We also show some essential applications of our result to non-convex optimization.
We introduce a novel methodology for particle filtering in dynamical systems where the evolution of the signal of interest is described by a SDE and observations are collected instantaneously at prescribed time instants. The new approach includes the discretisation of the SDE and the design of efficient particle filters for the resulting discrete-time state-space model. The discretisation scheme converges with weak order 1 and it is devised to create a sequential dependence structure along the coordinates of the discrete-time state vector. We introduce a class of space-sequential particle filters that exploits this structure to improve performance when the system dimension is large. This is numerically illustrated by a set of computer simulations for a stochastic Lorenz 96 system with additive noise. The new space-sequential particle filters attain approximately constant estimation errors as the dimension of the Lorenz 96 system is increased, with a computational cost that increases polynomially, rather than exponentially, with the system dimension. Besides the new numerical scheme and particle filters, we provide in this paper a general framework for discrete-time filtering in continuous-time dynamical systems described by a SDE and instantaneous observations. Provided that the SDE is discretised using a weakly-convergent scheme, we prove that the marginal posterior laws of the resulting discrete-time state-space model converge to the posterior marginal posterior laws of the original continuous-time state-space model under a suitably defined metric. This result is general and not restricted to the numerical scheme or particle filters specifically studied in this manuscript.
White noise is a fundamental and fairly well understood stochastic process that conforms the conceptual basis for many other processes, as well as for the modeling of time series. Here we push a fresh perspective toward white noise that, grounded on combinatorial considerations, contributes to give new interesting insights both for modelling and theoretical purposes. To this aim, we incorporate the ordinal pattern analysis approach which allows us to abstract a time series as a sequence of patterns and their associated permutations, and introduce a simple functional over permutations that partitions them into classes encoding their level of asymmetry. We compute the exact probability mass function (p.m.f.) of this functional over the symmetric group of degree $n$, thus providing the description for the case of an infinite white noise realization. This p.m.f. can be conveniently approximated by a continuous probability density from an exponential family, the Gaussian, hence providing natural sufficient statistics that render a convenient and simple statistical analysis through ordinal patterns. Such analysis is exemplified on experimental data for the spatial increments from tracks of gold nanoparticles in 3D diffusion.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'