No Arabic abstract
Multifidelity Monte Carlo methods rely on a hierarchy of possibly less accurate but statistically correlated simplified or reduced models, in order to accelerate the estimation of statistics of high-fidelity models without compromising the accuracy of the estimates. This approach has recently gained widespread attention in uncertainty quantification. This is partly due to the availability of optimal strategies for the estimation of the expectation of scalar quantities-of-interest. In practice, the optimal strategy for the expectation is also used for the estimation of variance and sensitivity indices. However, a general strategy is still lacking for vector-valued problems, nonlinearly statistically-dependent models, and estimators for which a closed-form expression of the error is unavailable. The focus of the present work is to generalize the standard multifidelity estimators to the above cases. The proposed generalized estimators lead to an optimization problem that can be solved analytically and whose coefficients can be estimated numerically with few runs of the high- and low-fidelity models. We analyze the performance of the proposed approach on a selected number of experiments, with a particular focus on cardiac electrophysiology, where a hierarchy of physics-based low-fidelity models is readily available.
We present a novel algorithmic approach and an error analysis leveraging Quasi-Monte Carlo points for training deep neural network (DNN) surrogates of Data-to-Observable (DtO) maps in engineering design. Our analysis reveals higher-order consistent, deterministic choices of training points in the input data space for deep and shallow Neural Networks with holomorphic activation functions such as tanh. These novel training points are proved to facilitate higher-order decay (in terms of the number of training samples) of the underlying generalization error, with consistency error bounds that are free from the curse of dimensionality in the input data space, provided that DNN weights in hidden layers satisfy certain summability conditions. We present numerical experiments for DtO maps from elliptic and parabolic PDEs with uncertain inputs that confirm the theoretical analysis.
A new (unadjusted) Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm with improved rates in total variation and in Wasserstein distance is presented. All these are obtained in the context of sampling from a target distribution $pi$ that has a density $hat{pi}$ on $mathbb{R}^d$ known up to a normalizing constant. Moreover, $-log hat{pi}$ is assumed to have a locally Lipschitz gradient and its third derivative is locally H{o}lder continuous with exponent $beta in (0,1]$. Non-asymptotic bounds are obtained for the convergence to stationarity of the new sampling method with convergence rate $1+ beta/2$ in Wasserstein distance, while it is shown that the rate is 1 in total variation even in the absence of convexity. Finally, in the case where $-log hat{pi}$ is strongly convex and its gradient is Lipschitz continuous, explicit constants are provided.
Many problems in machine learning and statistics involve nested expectations and thus do not permit conventional Monte Carlo (MC) estimation. For such problems, one must nest estimators, such that terms in an outer estimator themselves involve calculation of a separate, nested, estimation. We investigate the statistical implications of nesting MC estimators, including cases of multiple levels of nesting, and establish the conditions under which they converge. We derive corresponding rates of convergence and provide empirical evidence that these rates are observed in practice. We further establish a number of pitfalls that can arise from naive nesting of MC estimators, provide guidelines about how these can be avoided, and lay out novel methods for reformulating certain classes of nested expectation problems into single expectations, leading to improved convergence rates. We demonstrate the applicability of our work by using our results to develop a new estimator for discrete Bayesian experimental design problems and derive error bounds for a class of variational objectives.
A statistical learning approach for parametric PDEs related to Uncertainty Quantification is derived. The method is based on the minimization of an empirical risk on a selected model class and it is shown to be applicable to a broad range of problems. A general unified convergence analysis is derived, which takes into account the approximation and the statistical errors. By this, a combination of theoretical results from numerical analysis and statistics is obtained. Numerical experiments illustrate the performance of the method with the model class of hierarchical tensors.
Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method is a useful numerical tool for pricing and hedging of complex financial derivatives. These problems are usually of high dimensionality and discontinuities. The two factors may significantly deteriorate the performance of the QMC method. This paper develops an integrated method that overcomes the challenges of the high dimensionality and discontinuities concurrently. For this purpose, a smoothing method is proposed to remove the discontinuities for some typical functions arising from financial engineering. To make the smoothing method applicable for more general functions, a new path generation method is designed for simulating the paths of the underlying assets such that the resulting function has the required form. The new path generation method has an additional power to reduce the effective dimension of the target function. Our proposed method caters for a large variety of model specifications, including the Black-Scholes, exponential normal inverse Gaussian Levy, and Heston models. Numerical experiments dealing with these models show that in the QMC setting the proposed smoothing method in combination with the new path generation method can lead to a dramatic variance reduction for pricing exotic options with discontinuous payoffs and for calculating options Greeks. The investigation on the effective dimension and the related characteristics explains the significant enhancement of the combined procedure.