Jean-Christophe Mourrat

A. -C. Egloffe, A. Gloria, J. -C. Mourrat et al.

This article is concerned with numerical methods to approximate effective coefficients in stochastic homogenization of discrete linear elliptic equations, and their numerical analysis --- which has been made possible by recent contributions on quantitative stochastic homogenization theory by two of us and by Otto. This article makes the connection between our theoretical results and computations. We give a complete picture of the numerical methods found in the literature, compare them in terms of known (or expected) convergence rates, and study them numerically. Two types of methods are presented: methods based on the corrector equation, and methods based on random walks in random environments. The numerical study confirms the sharpness of the analysis (which it completes by making precise the prefactors, next to the convergence rates), supports some of our conjectures, and calls for new theoretical developments.

Antoine Gloria, Jean-Christophe Mourrat

This article deals with the numerical approximation of effective coefficients in stochastic homogenization of discrete linear elliptic equations. The originality of this work is the use of a well-known abstract spectral representation formula to design and analyze effective and computable approximations of the homogenized coefficients. In particular, we show that information on the edge of the spectrum of the generator of the environment viewed by the particle projected on the local drift yields bounds on the approximation error, and conversely. Combined with results by Otto and the first author in low dimension, and results by the second author in high dimension, this allows us to prove that for any dimension, there exists an explicit numerical strategy to approximate homogenized coefficients which converges at the rate of the central limit theorem.

Alexander Dunlap, Jean-Christophe Mourrat

Sum-of-norms clustering is a convex optimization problem whose solution can be used for the clustering of multivariate data. We propose and study a localized version of this method, and show in particular that it can separate arbitrarily close balls in the stochastic ball model. More precisely, we prove a quantitative bound on the error incurred in the clustering of disjoint connected sets. Our bound is expressed in terms of the number of datapoints and the localization length of the functional.

Alexander Dunlap, Jean-Christophe Mourrat

Sum-of-norms clustering is a popular convexification of $K$-means clustering. We show that, if the dataset is made of a large number of independent random variables distributed according to the uniform measure on the union of two disjoint balls of unit radius, and if the balls are sufficiently close to one another, then sum-of-norms clustering will typically fail to recover the decomposition of the dataset into two clusters. As the dimension tends to infinity, this happens even when the distance between the centers of the two balls is taken to be as large as $2\sqrt{2}$. In order to show this, we introduce and analyze a continuous version of sum-of-norms clustering, where the dataset is replaced by a general measure. In particular, we state and prove a local-global characterization of the clustering that seems to be new even in the case of discrete datapoints.

A. Hannukainen, J. -C. Mourrat, H. Stoppels

We present an efficient method for the computation of homogenized coefficients of divergence-form operators with random coefficients. The approach is based on a multiscale representation of the homogenized coefficients. We then implement the method numerically using a finite-element method with hierarchical hybrid grids, which is a semi-implicit method allowing for significant gains in memory usage and execution time. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on two- and three-dimensional examples, for piecewise-constant coefficients with corner discontinuities. For moderate ellipticity contrast and for a precision of a few percentage points, our method allows to compute the homogenized coefficients on a laptop computer in a few seconds, in two dimensions, or in a few minutes, in three dimensions.