We consider the problem of approximating the solution of variational problems subject to the constraint that the admissible functions must be convex. This problem is at the interface between convex analysis, convex optimization, variational problems, and partial differential equation techniques. The approach is to approximate the (non-polyhedral) cone of convex functions by a polyhedral cone which can be represented by linear inequalities. This approach leads to an optimization problem with linear constraints which can be computed efficiently, hundreds of times faster than existing methods.
There have been a few different numerical approaches to this problem, which rely on adapting PDE techniques to the problem at hand. Early work @cite_4 using PDE-type methods, did not make assertions about the convexity (or approximate convexity) of the resulting solutions. Later work by @cite_0 and @cite_5 identified some of the difficulties in working with convex functions. These difficulties suggest that a straightforward adaptation of standard numerical methods is not possible. The introduction of a large number (superlinear in the number of variables) of global constraints was required in order to ensure discrete convexity.
@cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_4
2016361304 2068491204 2963798430 2041509689
Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding an optimum over a family of convex functions. For instance, finding the projection on the convex functions in Hk(Ω), and optimizing functionals arising from some problems in economics. In the continuous setting and assuming smoothness, the convexity constraints may be given locally by asking the Hessian matrix to be positive semidefinite, but in making discrete approximations two difficulties arise: the continuous solutions may be not smooth, and functions with positive semidefinite discrete Hessian need not be convex in a discrete sense. Previous work has concentrated on non-local descriptions of convexity, making the number of constraints to grow super-linearly with the number of nodes even in dimension 2, and these descriptions are very difficult to extend to higher dimensions. In this paper we propose a finite difference approximation using positive semidefinite programs and discrete Hessians, and prove convergence under very general conditions, even when the continuous solution is not smooth, working on any dimension, and requiring a linear number of constraints in the number of nodes. Using semidefinite programming codes, we show concrete examples of approximations to problems in two and three dimensions. We consider the problem of approximating the solution of variational problems subject to the constraint that the admissible functions must be convex. This problem is at the interface between convex analysis, convex optimization, variational problems, and partial differential equation techniques. The approach is to approximate the (nonpolyhedral) cone of convex functions by a polyhedral cone which can be represented by linear inequalities. This approach leads to an optimization problem with linear constraints which can be computed efficiently, hundreds of times faster than existing methods. Parametrized families of PDEs arise in various contexts such as inverse problems, control and optimization, risk assessment, and uncertainty quantification. In most of these applications, the number of parameters is large or perhaps even infinite. Thus, the development of numerical methods for these parametric problems is faced with the possible curse of dimensionality. This article is directed at (i) identifying and understanding which properties of parametric equations allow one to avoid this curse and (ii) developing and analyzing effective numerical methodd which fully exploit these properties and, in turn, are immune to the growth in dimensionality. The first part of this article studies the smoothness and approximability of the solution map, that is, the map @math where @math is the parameter value and @math is the corresponding solution to the PDE. It is shown that for many relevant parametric PDEs, the parametric smoothness of this map is typically holomorphic and also highly anisotropic in that the relevant parameters are of widely varying importance in describing the solution. These two properties are then exploited to establish convergence rates of @math -term approximations to the solution map for which each term is separable in the parametric and physical variables. These results reveal that, at least on a theoretical level, the solution map can be well approximated by discretizations of moderate complexity, thereby showing how the curse of dimensionality is broken. This theoretical analysis is carried out through concepts of approximation theory such as best @math -term approximation, sparsity, and @math -widths. These notions determine a priori the best possible performance of numerical methods and thus serve as a benchmark for concrete algorithms. The second part of this article turns to the development of numerical algorithms based on the theoretically established sparse separable approximations. The numerical methods studied fall into two general categories. The first uses polynomial expansions in terms of the parameters to approximate the solution map. The second one searches for suitable low dimensional spaces for simultaneously approximating all members of the parametric family. The numerical implementation of these approaches is carried out through adaptive and greedy algorithms. An a priori analysis of the performance of these algorithms establishes how well they meet the theoretical benchmarks. The numerical approximation of parametric partial differential equations D(u,y)=0 is a computational challenge when the dimension d of the parameter vector y is large, due to the so-called curse of dimensionality. It was recently shown in [1,2] that, for a certain class of elliptic PDEs with diffusion coefficients depending on the parameters in an affine manner, there exist polynomial approximations to the solution map y↦u(y) with an algebraic convergence rate that is independent of the parametric dimension d. The analysis in [1,2] used, however, the affine parameter dependence of the operator. The present paper proposes a strategy for establishing similar results for classes of parametric PDEs that do not necessarily fall in this category. Our approach is based on building an analytic extension z↦u(z) of the solution map on certain tensor product of ellipses in the complex domain, and using this extension to estimate the Legendre coefficients of u. The varying semi-axes lengths of the ellipses in each coordinate zj reflect the anisotropy of the solution map with respect to the corresponding parametric variables yj. This allows us to derive algebraic convergence rates for tensorized Legendre expansions in the case d=∞. We also show that such rates are preserved when using certain interpolation procedures, which is an instance of a non-intrusive method. As examples of parametric PDEs that are covered by this approach, we consider (i) elliptic diffusion equations with coefficients that depend on the parameter vector y in a not necessarily affine manner, (ii) parabolic diffusion equations with similar dependence of the coefficient on y, (iii) nonlinear, monotone parametric elliptic PDEs, and (iv) elliptic equations set on a domain that is parametrized by the vector y. We give general strategies that allow us to derive the analytic extension in a unified abstract way for all these examples, in particular based on the holomorphic version of the implicit function theorem in Banach spaces. We expect that this approach can be applied to a large variety of parametric PDEs, showing that the curse of dimensionality can be overcome under mild assumptions.