The recently introduced full-history recursive multilevel Picard (MLP) approximation methods have turned out to be quite successful in the numerical approximation of solutions of high-dimensional nonlinear PDEs. In particular, there are mathematical convergence results in the literature which prove that MLP approximation methods do overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of nonlinear second-order PDEs in the sense that the number of computational operations of the proposed MLP approximation method grows at most polynomially in both the reciprocal $1/ε$ of the prescribed approximation accuracy $ε>0$ and the PDE dimension $d\in \mathbb{N}=\{1,2,3, \ldots\}$. However, in each of the convergence results for MLP approximation methods in the literature it is assumed that the coefficient functions in front of the second-order differential operator are affine linear. In particular, until today there is no result in the scientific literature which proves that any semilinear second-order PDE with a general time horizon and a non affine linear coefficient function in front of the second-order differential operator can be approximated without the curse of dimensionality. It is the key contribution of this article to overcome this obstacle and to propose and analyze a new type of MLP approximation method for semilinear second-order PDEs with possibly nonlinear coefficient functions in front of the second-order differential operators. In particular, the main result of this article proves that this new MLP approximation method does indeed overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of semilinear second-order PDEs.
The full history recursive multilevel Picard approximation method for semilinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) is the only method which provably overcomes the curse of dimensionality for general time horizons if the coefficient functions and the nonlinearity are globally Lipschitz continuous and the nonlinearity is gradient-independent. In this article we extend this result to locally monotone coefficient functions. Our results cover a range of semilinear PDEs with polynomial coefficient functions.
In the literatur there exist approximation methods for McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations which have a computational effort of order $3$. In this article we introduce full-history recursive multilevel Picard (MLP) approximations for McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations. We prove that these MLP approximations have computational effort of order $2+$ which is essentially optimal in high dimensions.
We consider ordinary differential equations (ODEs) which involve expectations of a random variable. These ODEs are special cases of McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equations (SDEs). A plain vanilla Monte Carlo approximation method for such ODEs requires a computational cost of order $\varepsilon^{-3}$ to achieve a root-mean-square error of size $\varepsilon$. In this work we adapt recently introduced full history recursive multilevel Picard (MLP) algorithms to reduce this computational complexity. Our main result shows for every $δ>0$ that the proposed MLP approximation algorithm require…
Multilevel Picard approximations and deep neural networks with ReLU, leaky ReLU, and softplus activation overcome the curse of dimensionality when approximating semilinear parabolic partial differential equations in $L^p$-sense
Division of Mathematical Sciences, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（数学科学系，物理与数学科学学院，南洋理工大学，新加坡）；Faculty of Mathematics, Bielefeld University, Germany（数学学院，比勒菲尔德大学，德国）
Multilevel Picard approximations overcome the curse of dimensionality when approximating semilinear heat equations with gradient-dependent nonlinearities in $L^p$-sense
Full history recursive multilevel Picard approximations suffer from the curse of dimensionality for the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation of a stochastic control problem
Backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) appear in numeruous applications. Classical approximation methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality and deep learning-based approximation methods are not known to converge to the BSDE solution. Recently, Hutzenthaler et al. (arXiv:2108.10602) introduced a new approximation method for BSDEs whose forward diffusion is Brownian motion and proved that this method converges with essentially optimal rate without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. The central object of this article is to extend this result to general forward diffusions…
One of the most challenging problems in applied mathematics is the approximate solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in high dimensions. Standard deterministic approximation methods like finite differences or finite elements suffer from the curse of dimensionality in the sense that the computational effort grows exponentially in the dimension. In this work we overcome this difficulty in the case of reaction-diffusion type PDEs with a locally Lipschitz continuous coervice nonlinearity (such as Allen-Cahn PDEs) by introducing and analyzing truncated variants of the recently…
Multilevel Picard approximations overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of general semilinear PDEs with gradient-dependent nonlinearities
It is one of the most challenging problems in applied mathematics to approximatively solve high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs). In particular, most of the numerical approximation schemes studied in the scientific literature suffer under the curse of dimensionality in the sense that the number of computational operations needed to compute an approximation with an error of size at most $ \varepsilon > 0 $ grows at least exponentially in the PDE dimension $ d \in \mathbb{N} $ or in the reciprocal of $ \varepsilon $. Recently, so-called full-history recursive multilevel Picard (…
Relying on the classical connection between Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (BSDEs) and non-linear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), we propose a new probabilistic learning scheme for solving high-dimensional semi-linear parabolic PDEs. This scheme is inspired by the approach coming from machine learning and developed using deep neural networks in Han and al. [32]. Our algorithm is based on a Picard iteration scheme in which a sequence of linear-quadratic optimisation problem is solved by means of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. In the framework of a line…
Recently, so-called full-history recursive multilevel Picard (MLP) approximation schemes have been introduced and shown to overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of semilinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) with Lipschitz nonlinearities. The key contribution of this article is to introduce and analyze a new variant of MLP approximation schemes for certain semilinear elliptic PDEs with Lipschitz nonlinearities and to prove that the proposed approximation schemes overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of such semilinear e…
One of the most challenging issues in applied mathematics is to develop and analyze algorithms which are able to approximately compute solutions of high-dimensional nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). In particular, it is very hard to develop approximation algorithms which do not suffer under the curse of dimensionality in the sense that the number of computational operations needed by the algorithm to compute an approximation of accuracy $ε> 0$ grows at most polynomially in both the reciprocal $1/ε$ of the required accuracy and the dimension $d \in \mathbb{N}$ of the PDE. Recentl…
For a long time it is well-known that high-dimensional linear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs) can be approximated by Monte Carlo methods with a computational effort which grows polynomially both in the dimension and in the reciprocal of the prescribed accuracy. In other words, linear PDEs do not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. For general semilinear PDEs with Lipschitz coefficients, however, it remained an open question whether these suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this paper we partially solve this open problem. More precisely, we prove in the case of semi…
Full-history recursive multilevel Picard (MLP) approximation schemes have been shown to overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of high-dimensional semilinear partial differential equations (PDEs) with general time horizons and Lipschitz continuous nonlinearities. However, each of the error analyses for MLP approximation schemes in the existing literature studies the $L^2$-root-mean-square distance between the exact solution of the PDE under consideration and the considered MLP approximation and none of the error analyses in the existing literature provides an upper…
Deep neural networks and other deep learning methods have very successfully been applied to the numerical approximation of high-dimensional nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), which are widely used in finance, engineering, and natural sciences. In particular, simulations indicate that algorithms based on deep learning overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of solutions of semilinear PDEs. For certain linear PDEs this has also been proved mathematically. The key contribution of this article is to rigorously prove this for the first time for a …
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are a fundamental tool in the modeling of many real world phenomena. In a number of such real world phenomena the PDEs under consideration contain gradient-dependent nonlinearities and are high-dimensional. Such high-dimensional nonlinear PDEs can in nearly all cases not be solved explicitly and it is one of the most challenging tasks in applied mathematics to solve high-dimensional nonlinear PDEs approximately. It is especially very challenging to design approximation algorithms for nonlinear PDEs for which one can rigorously prove that they do overcome t…
In recent years, tremendous progress has been made on numerical algorithms for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in a very high dimension, using ideas from either nonlinear (multilevel) Monte Carlo or deep learning. They are potentially free of the curse of dimensionality for many different applications and have been proven to be so in the case of some nonlinear Monte Carlo methods for nonlinear parabolic PDEs. In this paper, we review these numerical and theoretical advances. In addition to algorithms based on stochastic reformulations of the original problem, such as the multilev…
Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL)（瑞士联邦森林、雪与景观研究所（WSL））；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；University of Münster（明斯特大学）
Nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to model dynamical processes in a large number of scientific fields, ranging from finance to biology. In many applications standard local models are not sufficient to accurately account for certain non-local phenomena such as, e.g., interactions at a distance. In order to properly capture these phenomena non-local nonlinear PDE models are frequently employed in the literature. In this article we propose two numerical methods based on machine learning and on Picard iterations, respectively, to approximately solve non-local nonlinear PDEs.…
The approximative calculation of iterated nested expectations is a recurring challenging problem in applications. Nested expectations appear, for example, in the numerical approximation of solutions of backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs), in the numerical approximation of solutions of semilinear parabolic partial differential equations (PDEs), in statistical physics, in optimal stopping problems such as the approximative pricing of American or Bermudan options, in risk measure estimation in mathematical finance, or in decision-making under uncertainty. Nested expectations which …
