Local approximation of operators

TL;DR

This paper develops efficient constructive methods for approximating nonlinear operators between metric spaces, focusing on reducing complexity and error estimates when encoding functions with finite information, applicable to various scientific problems.

Contribution

It introduces new techniques for approximating operators with controlled error bounds, especially emphasizing local approximation and complexity reduction in high-dimensional settings.

Findings

Approximation constants are of order d^{1/6}

Methods work for different smoothness classes of operators

Local information significantly reduces parameter requirements

Abstract

Many applications, such as system identification, classification of time series, direct and inverse problems in partial differential equations, and uncertainty quantification lead to the question of approximation of a non-linear operator between metric spaces $\mathfrak{X}$ and $\mathfrak{Y}$. We study the problem of determining the degree of approximation of such operators on a compact subset $K_\mathfrak{X}\subset \mathfrak{X}$ using a finite amount of information. If $\mathcal{F}: K_\mathfrak{X}\to K_\mathfrak{Y}$, a well established strategy to approximate $\mathcal{F}(F)$ for some $F\in K_\mathfrak{X}$ is to encode $F$ (respectively, $\mathcal{F}(F)$) in terms of a finite number $d$ (repectively $m$) of real numbers. Together with appropriate reconstruction algorithms (decoders), the problem reduces to the approximation of $m$ functions on a compact subset of a high dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$, equivalently, the unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^d$ embedded in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$. The problem is challenging because $d$, $m$, as well as the complexity of the approximation on $\mathbb{S}^d$ are all large, and it is necessary to estimate the accuracy keeping track of the inter-dependence of all the approximations involved. In this paper, we establish constructive methods to do this efficiently; i.e., with the constants involved in the estimates on the approximation on $\mathbb{S}^d$ being $\mathcal{O}(d^{1/6})$. We study different smoothness classes for the operators, and also propose a method for approximation of $\mathcal{F}(F)$ using only information in a small neighborhood of $F$, resulting in an effective reduction in the number of parameters involved.