Long Time Propagation of Stochasticity by Dynamical Polynomial Chaos Expansions
By: Hasan Cagan Ozen
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2017
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) play an important role in many areas of engineering and applied sciences such as atmospheric sciences, mechanical and aerospace engineering, geosciences, and finance. Equilibrium statistics and long-time solutions of these equations are pertinent to many applications. Typically, these models contain several uncertain parameters which need to be propagated in order to facilitate uncertainty quantification and prediction. Correspondingly, in this thesis, we propose a generalization of the Polynomial Chaos (PC) framework for long-time solutions of SDEs and SPDEs driven by Brownian motion forcing. Polynomial chaos expansions (PCEs) allow us to propagate uncertainties in the coefficients of these equations to the statistics of their solutions. Their main advantages are: (i) they replace stochastic equations by systems of deterministic equations; and (ii) they provide fast convergence. Their main challenge is that the computational cost becomes prohibitive when the dimension of the parameters modeling the stochasticity is even moderately large.

In particular, for equations with Brownian motion forcing, the long-time simulation by PC-based methods is notoriously difficult as the dimension of stochastic variables increases with time. With the goal in mind to deliver computationally efficient numerical algorithms for stochastic equations in the long time, our main strategy is to leverage the intrinsic sparsity in the dynamics by identifying the influential random parameters and construct spectral approximations to the solutions in terms of those relevant variables. Once this strategy is employed dynamically in time, using online constructions, approximations can retain their sparsity and accuracy; even for long times. To this end, exploiting Markov property of Brownian motion, we present a restart procedure that allows PCEs to expand the solutions at future times in terms of orthogonal polynomials of the measure describing the solution at a given time and the future Brownian motion. In case of SPDEs, the Karhunen-Loeve expansion (KLE) is applied at each restart to select the influential variables and keep the dimensionality minimal.

Using frequent restarts and low degree polynomials, the algorithms are able to capture long-time solutions accurately. We will also introduce, using the same principles, a similar algorithm based on a stochastic collocation method for the solutions of SDEs. We apply the methods to the numerical simulation of linear and nonlinear SDEs, and stochastic Burgers and Navier-Stokes equations with white noise forcing. Our methods also allow us to incorporate time-independent random coefficients such as a random viscosity. We propose several numerical simulations, and show that the algorithms compare favorably with standard Monte Carlo methods in terms of accuracy and computational times. To demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithms for long-time simulations, we compute invariant measures of the solutions when they exist.
Notes: Department: Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics.

Thesis advisor: Guillaume Bal.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 2017.