In this paper, we present numerical procedures to compute solutions of partial differential equations posed on fractals. In particular, we consider the strong form of the equation using standard graph Laplacian matrices and also weak forms of the equation derived using standard length or area measure on a discrete approximation of the fractal set. We then introduce a numerical procedure to normalize the obtained diffusions, that is, a way to compute the renormalization constant needed in the definitions of the actual partial differential equation on the fractal set. A particular case that is studied in detail is the solution of the Dirichlet problem in the Sierpinski triangle. Other examples are also presented including a non-planar Hata tree.
In this paper, an upwind GFDM is developed for the coupled heat and mass transfer problems in porous media. GFDM is a meshless method that can obtain the difference schemes of spatial derivatives by using Taylor expansion in local node influence domains and the weighted least squares method. The first-order single-point upstream scheme in the FDM/FVM-based reservoir simulator is introduced to GFDM to form the upwind GFDM, based on which, a sequential coupled discrete scheme of the pressure diffusion equation and the heat convection-conduction equation is solved to obtain pressure and temperature profiles. This paper demonstrates that this method can be used to obtain the meshless solution of the convection-diffusion equation with a stable upwind effect. For porous flow problems, the upwind GFDM is more practical and stable than the method of manually adjusting the influence domain based on the prior information of the flow field to achieve the upwind effect. Two types of calculation errors are analyzed, and three numerical examples are implemented to illustrate the good calculation accuracy and convergence of the upwind GFDM for heat and mass transfer problems in porous media, and indicate the increase of the radius of the node influence domain will increase the calculation error of temperature profiles. Overall, the upwind GFDM discretizes the computational domain using only a point cloud that is generated with much less topological constraints than the generated mesh, but achieves good computational performance as the mesh-based approaches, and therefore has great potential to be developed as a general-purpose numerical simulator for various porous flow problems in domains with complex geometry.
We introduce and analyze various Regularized Combined Field Integral Equations (CFIER) formulations of time-harmonic Navier equations in media with piece-wise constant material properties. These formulations can be derived systematically starting from suitable coercive approximations of Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators (DtN), and we present a periodic pseudodifferential calculus framework within which the well posedness of CIER formulations can be established. We also use the DtN approximations to derive and analyze Optimized Schwarz (OS) methods for the solution of elastodynamics transmission problems. The pseudodifferential calculus we develop in this paper relies on careful singularity splittings of the kernels of Navier boundary integral operators which is also the basis of high-order Nystr\"om quadratures for their discretizations. Based on these high-order discretizations we investigate the rate of convergence of iterative solvers applied to CFIER and OS formulations of scattering and transmission problems. We present a variety of numerical results that illustrate that the CFIER methodology leads to important computational savings over the classical CFIE one, whenever iterative solvers are used for the solution of the ensuing discretized boundary integral equations. Finally, we show that the OS methods are competitive in the high-frequency high-contrast regime.
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.
In this paper we get error bounds for fully discrete approximations of infinite horizon problems via the dynamic programming approach. It is well known that considering a time discretization with a positive step size $h$ an error bound of size $h$ can be proved for the difference between the value function (viscosity solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation corresponding to the infinite horizon) and the value function of the discrete time problem. However, including also a spatial discretization based on elements of size $k$ an error bound of size $O(k/h)$ can be found in the literature for the error between the value functions of the continuous problem and the fully discrete problem. In this paper we revise the error bound of the fully discrete method and prove, under similar assumptions to those of the time discrete case, that the error of the fully discrete case is in fact $O(h+k)$ which gives first order in time and space for the method. This error bound matches the numerical experiments of many papers in the literature in which the behaviour $1/h$ from the bound $O(k/h)$ have not been observed.
This paper makes the first attempt to apply newly developed upwind GFDM for the meshless solution of two-phase porous flow equations. In the presented method, node cloud is used to flexibly discretize the computational domain, instead of complicated mesh generation. Combining with moving least square approximation and local Taylor expansion, spatial derivatives of oil-phase pressure at a node are approximated by generalized difference operators in the local influence domain of the node. By introducing the first-order upwind scheme of phase relative permeability, and combining the discrete boundary conditions, fully-implicit GFDM-based nonlinear discrete equations of the immiscible two-phase porous flow are obtained and solved by the nonlinear solver based on the Newton iteration method with the automatic differentiation, to avoid the additional computational cost and possible computational instability caused by sequentially coupled scheme. Two numerical examples are implemented to test the computational performances of the presented method. Detailed error analysis finds the two sources of the calculation error, roughly studies the convergence order thus find that the low-order error of GFDM makes the convergence order of GFDM lower than that of FDM when node spacing is small, and points out the significant effect of the symmetry or uniformity of the node collocation in the node influence domain on the accuracy of generalized difference operators, and the radius of the node influence domain should be small to achieve high calculation accuracy, which is a significant difference between the studied hyperbolic two-phase porous flow problem and the elliptic problems when GFDM is applied.
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.
Generalized pair weights of linear codes are generalizations of minimum symbol-pair weights, which were introduced by Liu and Pan \cite{LP} recently. Generalized pair weights can be used to characterize the ability of protecting information in the symbol-pair read wire-tap channels of type II. In this paper, we introduce the notion of generalized $b$-symbol weights of linear codes over finite fields, which is a generalization of generalized Hamming weights and generalized pair weights. We obtain some basic properties and bounds of generalized $b$-symbol weights which are called Singleton-like bounds for generalized $b$-symbol weights. As examples, we calculate generalized weight matrices for simplex codes and Hamming codes. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for a linear code to be a $b$-symbol MDS code by using the generator matrix and the parity check matrix of this linear code. Finally, a necessary and sufficient condition of a linear isomorphism preserving $b$-symbol weights between two linear codes is obtained. As a corollary, we get the classical MacWilliams extension theorem when $b=1$.
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.
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.'
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.