Alexander Litvinenko

Bojana V. Rosić, Anna Kučerová, Jan Sýkora et al.

Parameter identification problems are formulated in a probabilistic language, where the randomness reflects the uncertainty about the knowledge of the true values. This setting allows conceptually easily to incorporate new information, e.g. through a measurement, by connecting it to Bayes's theorem. The unknown quantity is modelled as a (may be high-dimensional) random variable. Such a description has two constituents, the measurable function and the measure. One group of methods is identified as updating the measure, the other group changes the measurable function. We connect both groups with the relatively recent methods of functional approximation of stochastic problems, and introduce especially in combination with the second group of methods a new procedure which does not need any sampling, hence works completely deterministically. It also seems to be the fastest and more reliable when compared with other methods. We show by example that it also works for highly nonlinear non-smooth problems with non-Gaussian measures.

Sergey Dolgov, Boris N. Khoromskij, Alexander Litvinenko et al.

We apply the Tensor Train (TT) decomposition to construct the tensor product Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) of a random field, to solve the stochastic elliptic diffusion PDE with the stochastic Galerkin discretization, and to compute some quantities of interest (mean, variance, exceedance probabilities). We assume that the random diffusion coefficient is given as a smooth transformation of a Gaussian random field. In this case, the PCE is delivered by a complicated formula, which lacks an analytic TT representation. To construct its TT approximation numerically, we develop the new block TT cross algorithm, a method that computes the whole TT decomposition from a few evaluations of the PCE formula. The new method is conceptually similar to the adaptive cross approximation in the TT format, but is more efficient when several tensors must be stored in the same TT representation, which is the case for the PCE. Besides, we demonstrate how to assemble the stochastic Galerkin matrix and to compute the solution of the elliptic equation and its post-processing, staying in the TT format. We compare our technique with the traditional sparse polynomial chaos and the Monte Carlo approaches. In the tensor product polynomial chaos, the polynomial degree is bounded for each random variable independently. This provides higher accuracy than the sparse polynomial set or the Monte Carlo method, but the cardinality of the tensor product set grows exponentially with the number of random variables. However, when the PCE coefficients are implicitly approximated in the TT format, the computations with the full tensor product polynomial set become possible. In the numerical experiments, we confirm that the new methodology is competitive in a wide range of parameters, especially where high accuracy and high polynomial degrees are required.

Alexander Litvinenko, David Keyes, Venera Khoromskaia et al.

In this work, we describe advanced numerical tools for working with multivariate functions and for the analysis of large data sets. These tools will drastically reduce the required computing time and the storage cost, and, therefore, will allow us to consider much larger data sets or finer meshes. Covariance matrices are crucial in spatio-temporal statistical tasks, but are often very expensive to compute and store, especially in 3D. Therefore, we approximate covariance functions by cheap surrogates in a low-rank tensor format. We apply the Tucker and canonical tensor decompositions to a family of Matern- and Slater-type functions with varying parameters and demonstrate numerically that their approximations exhibit exponentially fast convergence. We prove the exponential convergence of the Tucker and canonical approximations in tensor rank parameters. Several statistical operations are performed in this low-rank tensor format, including evaluating the conditional covariance matrix, spatially averaged estimation variance, computing a quadratic form, determinant, trace, loglikelihood, inverse, and Cholesky decomposition of a large covariance matrix. Low-rank tensor approximations reduce the computing and storage costs essentially. For example, the storage cost is reduced from an exponential $\mathcal{O}(n^d)$ to a linear scaling $\mathcal{O}(drn)$, where $d$ is the spatial dimension, $n$ is the number of mesh points in one direction, and $r$ is the tensor rank. Prerequisites for applicability of the proposed techniques are the assumptions that the data, locations, and measurements lie on a tensor (axes-parallel) grid and that the covariance function depends on a distance, $\Vert x-y \Vert$.

Alexander Litvinenko, Abdulkadir C. Yucel, Hakan Bagci et al.

Computational tools for characterizing electromagnetic scattering from objects with uncertain shapes are needed in various applications ranging from remote sensing at microwave frequencies to Raman spectroscopy at optical frequencies. Often, such computational tools use the Monte Carlo (MC) method to sample a parametric space describing geometric uncertainties. For each sample, which corresponds to a realization of the geometry, a deterministic electromagnetic solver computes the scattered fields. However, for an accurate statistical characterization the number of MC samples has to be large. In this work, to address this challenge, the continuation multilevel Monte Carlo (CMLMC) method is used together with a surface integral equation solver. The CMLMC method optimally balances statistical errors due to sampling of the parametric space, and numerical errors due to the discretization of the geometry using a hierarchy of discretizations, from coarse to fine. The number of realizations of finer discretizations can be kept low, with most samples computed on coarser discretizations to minimize computational cost. Consequently, the total execution time is significantly reduced, in comparison to the standard MC scheme.

Hermann G. Matthies, Alexander Litvinenko, Bojana V. Rosic et al.

The inverse problem of determining parameters in a model by comparing some output of the model with observations is addressed. This is a description for what hat to be done to use the Gauss-Markov-Kalman filter for the Bayesian estimation and updating of parameters in a computational model. This is a filter acting on random variables, and while its Monte Carlo variant --- the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) --- is fairly straightforward, we subsequently only sketch its implementation with the help of functional representations.

Dishi Liu, Alexander Litvinenko, Claudia Schillings et al.

Uncertainty quantification in aerodynamic simulations calls for efficient numerical methods since it is computationally expensive, especially for the uncertainties caused by random geometry variations which involve a large number of variables. This paper compares five methods, including quasi-Monte Carlo quadrature, polynomial chaos with coefficients determined by sparse quadrature and gradient-enhanced version of Kriging, radial basis functions and point collocation polynomial chaos, in their efficiency in estimating statistics of aerodynamic performance upon random perturbation to the airfoil geometry which is parameterized by 9 independent Gaussian variables. The results show that gradient-enhanced surrogate methods achieve better accuracy than direct integration methods with the same computational cost.

Vladimir Berikov, Alexander Litvinenko

We solve a weakly supervised regression problem. Under "weakly" we understand that for some training points the labels are known, for some unknown, and for others uncertain due to the presence of random noise or other reasons such as lack of resources. The solution process requires to optimize a certain objective function (the loss function), which combines manifold regularization and low-rank matrix decomposition techniques. These low-rank approximations allow us to speed up all matrix calculations and reduce storage requirements. This is especially crucial for large datasets. Ensemble clustering is used for obtaining the co-association matrix, which we consider as the similarity matrix. The utilization of these techniques allows us to increase the quality and stability of the solution. In the numerical section, we applied the suggested method to artificial and real datasets using Monte-Carlo modeling.

Alexander Litvinenko, Dmitry Logashenko, Raul Tempone et al.

Accurate modeling of contamination in subsurface flow and water aquifers is crucial for agriculture and environmental protection. Here, we demonstrate a parallel method to quantify the propagation of the uncertainty in the dispersal of pollution in subsurface flow. Specifically, we consider the density-driven flow and estimate how uncertainty from permeability and porosity propagates to the solution. We take an Elder-like problem as a numerical benchmark and we use random fields to model the limited knowledge on the porosity and permeability. We construct a low-cost generalized polynomial chaos expansion (gPC) surrogate model, where the gPC coefficients are computed by projection on sparse and full tensor grids. We parallelize both the numerical solver for the deterministic problem based on the multigrid method, and the quadrature over the parametric space

Alexander Litvinenko

We provide more technical details about the HLIBCov package, which is using parallel hierarchical ($\H$-) matrices to identify unknown parameters of the covariance function (variance, smoothness, and covariance length). These parameters are estimated by maximizing the joint Gaussian log-likelihood function. The HLIBCov package approximates large dense inhomogeneous covariance matrices with a log-linear computational cost and storage requirement. We explain how to compute the Cholesky factorization, determinant, inverse and quadratic form in the H-matrix format. To demonstrate the numerical performance, we identify three unknown parameters in an example with 2,000,000 locations on a PC-desktop.

Sergey Dolgov, Alexander Litvinenko, Dishi Liu

Combination of low-tensor rank techniques and the Fast Fourier transform (FFT) based methods had turned out to be prominent in accelerating various statistical operations such as Kriging, computing conditional covariance, geostatistical optimal design, and others. However, the approximation of a full tensor by its low-rank format can be computationally formidable. In this work, we incorporate the robust Tensor Train (TT) approximation of covariance matrices and the efficient TT-Cross algorithm into the FFT-based Kriging. It is shown that here the computational complexity of Kriging is reduced to $\mathcal{O}(d r^3 n)$, where $n$ is the mode size of the estimation grid, $d$ is the number of variables (the dimension), and $r$ is the rank of the TT approximation of the covariance matrix. For many popular covariance functions the TT rank $r$ remains stable for increasing $n$ and $d$. The advantages of this approach against those using plain FFT are demonstrated in synthetic and real data examples.

Vladimir Berikov, Alexander Litvinenko

In this paper, we solve a semi-supervised regression problem. Due to the lack of knowledge about the data structure and the presence of random noise, the considered data model is uncertain. We propose a method which combines graph Laplacian regularization and cluster ensemble methodologies. The co-association matrix of the ensemble is calculated on both labeled and unlabeled data; this matrix is used as a similarity matrix in the regularization framework to derive the predicted outputs. We use the low-rank decomposition of the co-association matrix to significantly speedup calculations and reduce memory. Numerical experiments using the Monte Carlo approach demonstrate robustness, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed method.