  Many problems in science and engineering require the efficient numerical
approximation of integrals, a particularly important application being the
numerical solution of initial value problems for differential equations. For
complex systems, an equidistant discretization is often inadvisable, as it
either results in prohibitively large errors or computational effort. To this
end, adaptive schemes have been developed that rely on error estimators based
on Taylor series expansions. While these estimators a) rely on strong
smoothness assumptions and b) may still result in erroneous steps for complex
systems (and thus require step rejection mechanisms), we here propose a
data-driven time stepping scheme based on machine learning, and more
specifically on reinforcement learning (RL) and meta-learning. First, one or
several (in the case of non-smooth or hybrid systems) base learners are trained
using RL. Then, a meta-learner is trained which (depending on the system state)
selects the base learner that appears to be optimal for the current situation.
Several examples including both smooth and non-smooth problems demonstrate the
superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art numerical schemes.
The code is available under https://github.com/lueckem/quadrature-ML.
