This paper proposes an isogeometric boundary element method (IGBEM) to solve the electromagnetic scattering problems for three-dimensional doubly-periodic multi-layered structures. The main concerns are the constructions of (i) an open surface (between two layers) and (ii) a vector basis function with using the B-spline functions. Regarding (i), we considered an algorithm to generate a doubly-periodic open surface with the tensor product of the B-spline functions of any degree. Regarding (ii), we employed the vector basis function based on the B-spline functions, which was proposed by Buffa et al. (2010), and adapted it to the underlying periodic problems so that it can satisfy the quasi-periodic condition on the boundary of an open surface. The proposed IGBEM worked for solving some numerical examples satisfactorily and proved the applicability to plasmonic simulations.
A new local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for convection-diffusion equations on overlapping meshes with periodic boundary conditions was introduced in \cite{Overlap1}. With the new method, the primary variable $u$ and the auxiliary variable $p=u_x$ are solved on different meshes. In this paper, we will extend the idea to convection-diffusion equations with non-periodic boundary conditions, i.e. Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. The main difference is to adjust the boundary cells. Moreover, we study the stability and suboptimal error estimates. Finally, numerical experiments are given to verify the theoretical findings.
The Virtual Element Method (VEM) is a Galerkin approximation method that extends the Finite Element Method (FEM) to polytopal meshes. In this paper, we present a conforming formulation that generalizes the Scott-Vogelius finite element method for the numerical approximation of the Stokes problem to polygonal meshes in the framework of the virtual element method. In particular, we consider a straightforward application of the virtual element approximation space for scalar elliptic problems to the vector case and approximate the pressure variable through discontinuous polynomials. We assess the effectiveness of the numerical approximation by investigating the convergence on a manufactured solution problem and a set of representative polygonal meshes. We numerically show that this formulation is convergent with optimal convergence rates except for the lowest-order case on triangular meshes, where the method coincides with the $P_1-P_0$ Scott-Vogelius scheme, and on square meshes, which are situations that are well-known to be unstable.
Inferential models (IMs) are data-dependent, probability-like structures designed to quantify uncertainty about unknowns. As the name suggests, the focus has been on uncertainty quantification for inference, and on establishing a validity property that ensures the IM is reliable in a specific sense. The present paper develops an IM framework for decision problems and, in particular, investigates the decision-theoretic implications of the aforementioned validity property. I show that a valid IM's assessment of an action's quality, defined by a Choquet integral, will not be too optimistic compared to that of an oracle. This ensures that a valid IM tends not to favor actions that the oracle doesn't also favor, hence a valid IM is reliable for decision-making too. In a certain special class of structured statistical models, further connections can be made between the valid IM's favored actions and those favored by other more familiar frameworks, from which certain optimality conclusions can be drawn. An important step in these decision-theoretic developments is a characterization of the valid IM's credal set in terms of confidence distributions, which may be of independent interest.
In communication complexity the Arthur-Merlin (AM) model is the most natural one that allows both randomness and non-determinism. Presently we do not have any super-logarithmic lower bound for the AM-complexity of an explicit function. Obtaining such a bound is a fundamental challenge to our understanding of communication phenomena. In this article we explore the gap between the known techniques and the complexity class AM. In the first part we define a new natural class, Small-advantage Layered Arthur-Merlin (SLAM), that has the following properties: - SLAM is (strictly) included in AM and includes all previously known subclasses of AM with non-trivial lower bounds. - SLAM is qualitatively stronger than the union of those classes. - SLAM is a subject to the discrepancy bound: in particular, the inner product function does not have an efficient SLAM-protocol. Structurally this can be summarised as SBP $\cup$ UAM $\subset$ SLAM $\subseteq$ AM $\cap$ PP. In the second part we ask why proving a lower bound of $\omega(\sqrt n)$ on the MA-complexity of an explicit function seems to be difficult. Both of these results are related to the notion of layer complexity, which is, informally, the number of "layers of non-determinism" used by a protocol.
This paper focuses on the strong convergence of the truncated $\theta$-Milstein method for a class of nonautonomous stochastic differential delay equations whose drift and diffusion coefficients can grow polynomially. The convergence rate, which is close to one, is given under the weaker assumption than the monotone condition. To verify our theoretical findings, we present a numerical example.
In a companion study \cite{patterson2020computing2D}, we present a numerical method for simulating 2D viscous flow through an open compliant closed channel, drive by pressure gradient. We consider the highly viscous regime, where fluid dynamics is described by the Stokes equations, and the less viscous regime described by the Navier-Stokes equations. In this study, we extend the method to 3D tubular flow. The problem is formulated in axisymmetric cylindrical coordinates, an approach that is natural for tubular flow simulations and that substantially reduces computational cost. When the elastic tubular walls are stretched or compressed, they exert forces on the fluid. These singular forces introduce unsmoothness into the fluid solution. As in the companion 2D study \cite{patterson2020computing2D}, we extend the immersed interface method to an open tube, and we compute solution to the model equations using the resulting method. Numerical results indicate that this new method preserves sharp jumps in the solution and its derivatives, and converges with second-order accuracy in both space and time.
We consider the interaction between a free flowing fluid and a porous medium flow, where the free flowing fluid is described using the time dependent Stokes equations, and the porous medium flow is described using Darcy's law in the primal formulation. To solve this problem numerically, we use the diffuse interface approach, where the weak form of the coupled problem is written on an extended domain which contains both Stokes and Darcy regions. This is achieved using a phase-field function which equals one in the Stokes region and zero in the Darcy region, and smoothly transitions between these two values on a diffuse region of width $\epsilon$ around the Stokes-Darcy interface. We prove the convergence of the diffuse interface formulation to the standard, sharp interface formulation, and derive the rates of the convergence. This is performed by analyzing the modeling error of the diffuse interface approach at the continuous level, and by deriving the a priori error estimates for the diffuse interface method at the discrete level. The convergence rates are also derived computationally in a numerical example.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.
Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a widely used tool for machine learning in distributed settings, where a machine learning model is trained over distributed data sources through an interactive process of local computation and message passing. Such an iterative process could cause privacy concerns of data owners. The goal of this paper is to provide differential privacy for ADMM-based distributed machine learning. Prior approaches on differentially private ADMM exhibit low utility under high privacy guarantee and often assume the objective functions of the learning problems to be smooth and strongly convex. To address these concerns, we propose a novel differentially private ADMM-based distributed learning algorithm called DP-ADMM, which combines an approximate augmented Lagrangian function with time-varying Gaussian noise addition in the iterative process to achieve higher utility for general objective functions under the same differential privacy guarantee. We also apply the moments accountant method to bound the end-to-end privacy loss. The theoretical analysis shows that DP-ADMM can be applied to a wider class of distributed learning problems, is provably convergent, and offers an explicit utility-privacy tradeoff. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to provide explicit convergence and utility properties for differentially private ADMM-based distributed learning algorithms. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can achieve good convergence and model accuracy under high end-to-end differential privacy guarantee.
Owing to the recent advances in "Big Data" modeling and prediction tasks, variational Bayesian estimation has gained popularity due to their ability to provide exact solutions to approximate posteriors. One key technique for approximate inference is stochastic variational inference (SVI). SVI poses variational inference as a stochastic optimization problem and solves it iteratively using noisy gradient estimates. It aims to handle massive data for predictive and classification tasks by applying complex Bayesian models that have observed as well as latent variables. This paper aims to decentralize it allowing parallel computation, secure learning and robustness benefits. We use Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers in a top-down setting to develop a distributed SVI algorithm such that independent learners running inference algorithms only require sharing the estimated model parameters instead of their private datasets. Our work extends the distributed SVI-ADMM algorithm that we first propose, to an ADMM-based networked SVI algorithm in which not only are the learners working distributively but they share information according to rules of a graph by which they form a network. This kind of work lies under the umbrella of `deep learning over networks' and we verify our algorithm for a topic-modeling problem for corpus of Wikipedia articles. We illustrate the results on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model in large document classification, compare performance with the centralized algorithm, and use numerical experiments to corroborate the analytical results.