Overcoming the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of parabolic partial differential equations with gradient-dependent nonlinearities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new recursive multilevel Picard algorithm that effectively solves high-dimensional, gradient-dependent nonlinear PDEs, overcoming the curse of dimensionality with proven polynomial complexity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel full-history recursive multilevel Picard method and rigorously proves its ability to overcome the curse of dimensionality for certain nonlinear PDEs.

Findings

Algorithm overcomes curse of dimensionality

Polynomial complexity in dimension and accuracy

Applicable to high-dimensional nonlinear heat equations

Abstract

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 the so-called curse of dimensionality in the sense that the number of computational operations of the approximation algorithm needed to achieve an approximation precision of size $\varepsilon$ > 0 grows at most polynomially in both the PDE dimension $d \in \mathbb{N}$ and the reciprocal of the prescribed approximation accuracy $\varepsilon$. In particular, to the best of our knowledge there exists no approximation algorithm in the scientific literature which has been proven to overcome the curse of dimensionality in the case of a class of nonlinear PDEs with general time horizons and gradient-dependent nonlinearities. It is the key contribution of this article to overcome this difficulty. More specifically, it is the key contribution of this article (i) to propose a new full-history recursive multilevel Picard approximation algorithm for high-dimensional nonlinear heat equations with general time horizons and gradient-dependent nonlinearities and (ii) to rigorously prove that this full-history recursive multilevel Picard approximation algorithm does indeed overcome the curse of dimensionality in the case of such nonlinear heat equations with gradient-dependent nonlinearities.