We use a numerical-analytic technique to construct a sequence of successive approximations to the solution of a system of fractional differential equations, subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions. We prove the uniform convergence of the sequence of approximations to a limit function, which is the unique solution to the boundary value problem under consideration, and give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions. The obtained theoretical results are confirmed by a model example.
We consider the Cauchy problem for the Helmholtz equation with a domain in R^d, d>2 with N cylindrical outlets to infinity with bounded inclusions in R^{d-1}. Cauchy data are prescribed on the boundary of the bounded domains and the aim is to find solution on the unbounded part of the boundary. In 1989, Kozlov and Maz'ya proposed an alternating iterative method for solving Cauchy problems associated with elliptic,self-adjoint and positive-definite operators in bounded domains. Different variants of this method for solving Cauchy problems associated with Helmholtz-type operators exists. We consider the variant proposed by Mpinganzima et al. for bounded domains and derive the necessary conditions for the convergence of the procedure in unbounded domains. For the numerical implementation, a finite difference method is used to solve the problem in a simple rectangular domain in R^2 that represent a truncated infinite strip. The numerical results shows that by appropriate truncation of the domain and with appropriate choice of the Robin parameters, the Robin-Dirichlet alternating iterative procedure is convergent.
The biharmonic equation with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions discretized using the mixed finite element method and piecewise linear (with the possible exception of boundary triangles) finite elements on triangular elements has been well-studied for domains in R2. Here we study the analogous problem on polyhedral surfaces. In particular, we provide a convergence proof of discrete solutions to the corresponding smooth solution of the biharmonic equation. We obtain convergence rates that are identical to the ones known for the planar setting. Our proof focuses on three different problems: solving the biharmonic equation on the surface, solving the biharmonic equation in a discrete space in the metric of the surface, and solving the biharmonic equation in a discrete space in the metric of the polyhedral approximation of the surface. We employ inverse discrete Laplacians to bound the error between the solutions of the two discrete problems, and generalize a flat strategy to bound the remaining error between the discrete solutions and the exact solution on the curved surface.
The Bayesian information criterion (BIC), defined as the observed data log likelihood minus a penalty term based on the sample size $N$, is a popular model selection criterion for factor analysis with complete data. This definition has also been suggested for incomplete data. However, the penalty term based on the `complete' sample size $N$ is the same no matter whether in a complete or incomplete data case. For incomplete data, there are often only $N_i<N$ observations for variable $i$, which means that using the `complete' sample size $N$ implausibly ignores the amounts of missing information inherent in incomplete data. Given this observation, a novel criterion called hierarchical BIC (HBIC) for factor analysis with incomplete data is proposed. The novelty is that it only uses the actual amounts of observed information, namely $N_i$'s, in the penalty term. Theoretically, it is shown that HBIC is a large sample approximation of variational Bayesian (VB) lower bound, and BIC is a further approximation of HBIC, which means that HBIC shares the theoretical consistency of BIC. Experiments on synthetic and real data sets are conducted to access the finite sample performance of HBIC, BIC, and related criteria with various missing rates. The results show that HBIC and BIC perform similarly when the missing rate is small, but HBIC is more accurate when the missing rate is not small.
A central quest of probing is to uncover how pre-trained models encode a linguistic property within their representations. An encoding, however, might be spurious-i.e., the model might not rely on it when making predictions. In this paper, we try to find encodings that the model actually uses, introducing a usage-based probing setup. We first choose a behavioral task which cannot be solved without using the linguistic property. Then, we attempt to remove the property by intervening on the model's representations. We contend that, if an encoding is used by the model, its removal should harm the performance on the chosen behavioral task. As a case study, we focus on how BERT encodes grammatical number, and on how it uses this encoding to solve the number agreement task. Experimentally, we find that BERT relies on a linear encoding of grammatical number to produce the correct behavioral output. We also find that BERT uses a separate encoding of grammatical number for nouns and verbs. Finally, we identify in which layers information about grammatical number is transferred from a noun to its head verb.
In this article we suggest two discretization methods based on isogeometric analysis (IGA) for planar linear elasticity. On the one hand, we apply the well-known ansatz of weakly imposed symmetry for the stress tensor and obtain a well-posed mixed formulation. Such modified mixed problems have been already studied by different authors. But we concentrate on the exploitation of IGA results to handle also curved boundary geometries. On the other hand, we consider the more complicated situation of strong symmetry, i.e. we discretize the mixed weak form determined by the so-called Hellinger-Reissner variational principle. We show the existence of suitable approximate fields leading to an inf-sup stable saddle-point problem. For both discretization approaches we prove convergence statements and in case of weak symmetry we illustrate the approximation behavior by means of several numerical experiments.
The metriplectic formalism is useful for describing complete dynamical systems which conserve energy and produce entropy. This creates challenges for model reduction, as the elimination of high-frequency information will generally not preserve the metriplectic structure which governs long-term stability of the system. Based on proper orthogonal decomposition, a provably convergent metriplectic reduced-order model is formulated which is guaranteed to maintain the algebraic structure necessary for energy conservation and entropy formation. Numerical results on benchmark problems show that the proposed method is remarkably stable, leading to improved accuracy over long time scales at a moderate increase in cost over naive methods.
Convection-diffusion-reaction equations model the conservation of scalar quantities. From the analytic point of view, solution of these equations satisfy under certain conditions maximum principles, which represent physical bounds of the solution. That the same bounds are respected by numerical approximations of the solution is often of utmost importance in practice. The mathematical formulation of this property, which contributes to the physical consistency of a method, is called Discrete Maximum Principle (DMP). In many applications, convection dominates diffusion by several orders of magnitude. It is well known that standard discretizations typically do not satisfy the DMP in this convection-dominated regime. In fact, in this case, it turns out to be a challenging problem to construct discretizations that, on the one hand, respect the DMP and, on the other hand, compute accurate solutions. This paper presents a survey on finite element methods, with a main focus on the convection-dominated regime, that satisfy a local or a global DMP. The concepts of the underlying numerical analysis are discussed. The survey reveals that for the steady-state problem there are only a few discretizations, all of them nonlinear, that at the same time satisfy the DMP and compute reasonably accurate solutions, e.g., algebraically stabilized schemes. Moreover, most of these discretizations have been developed in recent years, showing the enormous progress that has been achieved lately. Methods based on algebraic stabilization, nonlinear and linear ones, are currently as well the only finite element methods that combine the satisfaction of the global DMP and accurate numerical results for the evolutionary equations in the convection-dominated situation.
The minimum energy path (MEP) describes the mechanism of reaction, and the energy barrier along the path can be used to calculate the reaction rate in thermal systems. The nudged elastic band (NEB) method is one of the most commonly used schemes to compute MEPs numerically. It approximates an MEP by a discrete set of configuration images, where the discretization size determines both computational cost and accuracy of the simulations. In this paper, we consider a discrete MEP to be a stationary state of the NEB method and prove an optimal convergence rate of the discrete MEP with respect to the number of images. Numerical simulations for the transitions of some several proto-typical model systems are performed to support the theory.
The numerical solution of singular eigenvalue problems is complicated by the fact that small perturbations of the coefficients may have an arbitrarily bad effect on eigenvalue accuracy. However, it has been known for a long time that such perturbations are exceptional and standard eigenvalue solvers, such as the QZ algorithm, tend to yield good accuracy despite the inevitable presence of roundoff error. Recently, Lotz and Noferini quantified this phenomenon by introducing the concept of $\delta$-weak eigenvalue condition numbers. In this work, we consider singular quadratic eigenvalue problems and two popular linearizations. Our results show that a correctly chosen linearization increases $\delta$-weak eigenvalue condition numbers only marginally, justifying the use of these linearizations in numerical solvers also in the singular case. We propose a very simple but often effective algorithm for computing well-conditioned eigenvalues of a singular quadratic eigenvalue problems by adding small random perturbations to the coefficients. We prove that the eigenvalue condition number is, with high probability, a reliable criterion for detecting and excluding spurious eigenvalues created from the singular part.
The Monge-Amp\`ere equation is a fully nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) of fundamental importance in analysis, geometry and in the applied sciences. In this paper we solve the Dirichlet problem associated with the Monge-Amp\`ere equation using neural networks and we show that an ansatz using deep input convex neural networks can be used to find the unique convex solution. As part of our analysis we study the effect of singularities, discontinuities and noise in the source function, we consider nontrivial domains, and we investigate how the method performs in higher dimensions. We also compare this method to an alternative approach in which standard feed-forward networks are used together with a loss function which penalizes lack of convexity.