In micro-fluidics not only does capillarity dominate but also thermal fluctuations become important. On the level of the lubrication approximation, this leads to a quasi-linear fourth-order parabolic equation for the film height $h$ driven by space-time white noise. The gradient flow structure of its deterministic counterpart, the thin-film equation, which encodes the balance between driving capillary and limiting viscous forces, provides the guidance for the thermodynamically consistent introduction of fluctuations. We follow this route on the level of a spatial discretization of the gradient flow structure. Starting from an energetically conformal finite-element (FE) discretization, we point out that the numerical mobility function introduced by Gr\"un and Rumpf can be interpreted as a discretization of the metric tensor in the sense of a mixed FE method with lumping. While this discretization was devised in order to preserve the so-called entropy estimate, we use this to show that the resulting high-dimensional stochastic differential equation (SDE) preserves pathwise and pointwise strict positivity, at least in case of the physically relevant mobility function arising from the no-slip boundary condition. As a consequence, this discretization gives rise to a consistent invariant measure, namely a discretization of the Brownian excursion (up to the volume constraint), and thus features an entropic repulsion. The price to pay over more naive discretizations is that when writing the SDE in It\^o's form, which is the basis for the Euler-Mayurama time discretization, a correction term appears. To conclude, we perform various numerical experiments to compare the behavior of our discretization to that of the more naive finite difference discretization of the equation.
In this paper we develop a Jacobi-type algorithm for the (approximate) diagonalization of tensors of order $d\geq3$ via tensor trace maximization. For a general tensor this is an alternating least squares algorithm and the rotation matrices are chosen in each mode one-by-one to maximize the tensor trace. On the other hand, for symmetric tensors we discuss a structure-preserving variant of this algorithm where in each iteration the same rotation is applied in all modes. We show that both versions of the algorithm converge to the stationary points of the corresponding objective functions.
We present the first review of methods to overapproximate the set of reachable states of linear time-invariant systems subject to uncertain initial states and input signals for short time horizons. These methods are fundamental to state-of-the-art reachability algorithms for long time horizons, which proceed in two steps: they first use such a method to discretize the system for a short time horizon, and then they efficiently obtain a solution of the new discrete system for the long time horizon. Traditionally, both qualitative and quantitative comparison between different reachability algorithms has only considered the combination of both steps. In this paper we study the first step in isolation. We perform a variety of numerical experiments for six fundamental discretization methods from the literature. As we show, these methods have different trade-offs regarding accuracy and computational cost and, depending on the characteristics of the system, some methods may be preferred over others. We also discuss preprocessing steps to improve the results and efficient implementation strategies.
The well-known stochastic SIS model characterized by highly nonlinear in epidemiology has a unique positive solution taking values in a bounded domain with a series of dynamical behaviors. However, the approximation methods to maintain the positivity and long-time behaviors for the stochastic SIS model, while very important, are also lacking. In this paper, based on a logarithmic transformation, we propose a novel explicit numerical method for a stochastic SIS epidemic model whose coefficients violate the global monotonicity condition, which can preserve the positivity of the original stochastic SIS model. And we show the strong convergence of the numerical method and derive that the rate of convergence is of order one. Moreover, the extinction of the exact solution of stochastic SIS model is reproduced. Some numerical experiments are given to illustrate the theoretical results and testify the efficiency of our algorithm.
The problem of finding the unique low dimensional decomposition of a given matrix has been a fundamental and recurrent problem in many areas. In this paper, we study the problem of seeking a unique decomposition of a low rank matrix $Y\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times n}$ that admits a sparse representation. Specifically, we consider $Y = A X\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times n}$ where the matrix $A\in \mathbb{R}^{p\times r}$ has full column rank, with $r < \min\{n,p\}$, and the matrix $X\in \mathbb{R}^{r\times n}$ is element-wise sparse. We prove that this sparse decomposition of $Y$ can be uniquely identified, up to some intrinsic signed permutation. Our approach relies on solving a nonconvex optimization problem constrained over the unit sphere. Our geometric analysis for the nonconvex optimization landscape shows that any {\em strict} local solution is close to the ground truth solution, and can be recovered by a simple data-driven initialization followed with any second order descent algorithm. At last, we corroborate these theoretical results with numerical experiments.
We construct a space-time parallel method for solving parabolic partial differential equations by coupling the Parareal algorithm in time with overlapping domain decomposition in space. Reformulating the original Parareal algorithm as a variational method and implementing a finite element discretization in space enables an adjoint-based a posteriori error analysis to be performed. Through an appropriate choice of adjoint problems and residuals the error analysis distinguishes between errors arising due to the temporal and spatial discretizations, as well as between the errors arising due to incomplete Parareal iterations and incomplete iterations of the domain decomposition solver. We first develop an error analysis for the Parareal method applied to parabolic partial differential equations, and then refine this analysis to the case where the associated spatial problems are solved using overlapping domain decomposition. These constitute our Time Parallel Algorithm (TPA) and Space-Time Parallel Algorithm (STPA) respectively. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the estimator for both algorithms and the iterations between distinct components of the error.
We consider two approaches to study non-reversible Markov processes, namely the Hypocoercivity Theory (HT) and GENERIC (General Equations for Non-Equilibrium Reversible-Irreversible Coupling); the basic idea behind both of them is to split the process into a reversible component and a non-reversible one, and then quantify the way in which they interact. We compare such theories and provide explicit formulas to pass from one formulation to the other; as a bi-product we give a simple proof of the link between reversibility of the dynamics and gradient flow structure of the associated Fokker-Planck equation. We do this both for linear Markov processes and for a class of nonlinear Markov process as well. We then characterize the structure of the Large deviation functional of generalised-reversible processes; this is a class of non-reversible processes of large relevance in applications. Finally, we show how our results apply to two classes of Markov processes, namely non-reversible diffusion processes and a class of Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs), which have recently attracted the attention of the statistical sampling community. In particular, for the PDMPs we consider we prove entropy decay.
This paper is concerned with the inverse problem of constructing a symmetric nonnegative matrix from realizable spectrum. We reformulate the inverse problem as an underdetermined nonlinear matrix equation over a Riemannian product manifold. To solve it, we develop a Riemannian underdetermined inexact Newton dogleg method for solving a general underdetermined nonlinear equation defined between Riemannian manifolds and Euclidean spaces. The global and quadratic convergence of the proposed method is established under some mild assumptions. Then we solve the inverse problem by applying the proposed method to its equivalent nonlinear matrix equation and a preconditioner for the perturbed normal Riemannian Newton equation is also constructed. Numerical tests show the efficiency of the proposed method for solving the inverse problem.
Brownian motion on manifolds with non-trivial diffusion coefficient can be constructed by stochastic development of Euclidean Brownian motions using the fiber bundle of linear frames. We provide a comprehensive study of paths for such processes that are most probable in the sense of Onsager-Machlup, however with path probability measured on the driving Euclidean processes. We obtain both a full characterization of the resulting family of most probable paths, reduced equation systems for the path dynamics where the effect of curvature is directly identifiable, and explicit equations in special cases, including constant curvature surfaces where the coupling between curvature and covariance can be explicitly identified in the dynamics. We show how the resulting systems can be integrated numerically and use this to provide examples of most probable paths on different geometries and new algorithms for estimation of mean and infinitesimal covariance.
In this paper we present results on asymptotic characteristics of multivariate function classes in the uniform norm. Our main interest is the approximation of functions with mixed smoothness parameter not larger than $1/2$. Our focus will be on the behavior of the best $m$-term trigonometric approximation as well as the decay of Kolmogorov and entropy numbers in the uniform norm. It turns out that these quantities share a few fundamental abstract properties like their behavior under real interpolation, such that they can be treated simultaneously. We start with proving estimates on finite rank convolution operators with range in a step hyperbolic cross. These results imply bounds for the corresponding function space embeddings by a well-known decomposition technique. The decay of Kolmogorov numbers have direct implications for the problem of sampling recovery in $L_2$ in situations where recent results in the literature are not applicable since the corresponding approximation numbers are not square summable.
Controllers for autonomous systems that operate in safety-critical settings must account for stochastic disturbances. Such disturbances are often modelled as process noise, and common assumptions are that the underlying distributions are known and/or Gaussian. In practice, however, these assumptions may be unrealistic and can lead to poor approximations of the true noise distribution. We present a novel planning method that does not rely on any explicit representation of the noise distributions. In particular, we address the problem of computing a controller that provides probabilistic guarantees on safely reaching a target. First, we abstract the continuous system into a discrete-state model that captures noise by probabilistic transitions between states. As a key contribution, we adapt tools from the scenario approach to compute probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds on these transition probabilities, based on a finite number of samples of the noise. We capture these bounds in the transition probability intervals of a so-called interval Markov decision process (iMDP). This iMDP is robust against uncertainty in the transition probabilities, and the tightness of the probability intervals can be controlled through the number of samples. We use state-of-the-art verification techniques to provide guarantees on the iMDP, and compute a controller for which these guarantees carry over to the autonomous system. Realistic benchmarks show the practical applicability of our method, even when the iMDP has millions of states or transitions.