Accuracy and Stability of The Continuous-Time 3DVAR Filter for The Navier-Stokes Equation

The 3DVAR filter is prototypical of methods used to combine observed data with a dynamical system, online, in order to improve estimation of the state of the system. Such methods are used for high dimensional data assimilation problems, such as those arising in weather forecasting. To gain understanding of filters in applications such as these, it is hence of interest to study their behaviour when applied to infinite dimensional dynamical systems. This motivates study of the problem of accuracy and stability of 3DVAR filters for the Navier- Stokes equation. We work in the limit of high frequency observations and derive continuous time filters. This leads to a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) for state estimation, in the form of a dampeddriven Navier-Stokes equation, with mean-reversion to the signal, and spatially-correlated time-white noise. Both forward and pullback accuracy and stability results are proved for this SPDE, showing in particular that when enough low Fourier modes are observed, and when the model uncertainty is larger than the data uncertainty in these modes (variance inflation), then the filter can lock on to a small neighbourhood of the true signal, recovering from order one initial error, if the error in the observations modes is small. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the theory.

A posteriori error estimation for partial differential equations with random input data

Diane Sylvie Guignard

This thesis is devoted to the derivation of error estimates for partial differential equations with random input data, with a focus on a posteriori error estimates which are the basis for adaptive strategies. Such procedures aim at obtaining an approximation of the solution with a given precision while minimizing the computational costs. If several sources of error come into play, it is then necessary to balance them to avoid unnecessary work. We are first interested in problems that contain small uncertainties approximated by finite elements. The use of perturbation techniques is appropriate in this setting since only few terms in the power series expansion of the exact random solution with respect to a parameter characterizing the amount of randomness in the problem are required to obtain an accurate approximation. The goal is then to perform an error analysis for the finite element approximation of the expansion up to a certain order. First, an elliptic model problem with random diffusion coefficient with affine dependence on a vector of independent random variables is studied. We give both a priori and a posteriori error estimates for the first term in the expansion for various norms of the error. The results are then extended to higher order approximations and to other sources of uncertainty, such as boundary conditions or forcing term. Next, the analysis of nonlinear problems in random domains is proposed, considering the one-dimensional viscous Burgers' equation and the more involved incompressible steady-state Navier-Stokes equations. The domain mapping method is used to transform the equations in random domains into equations in a fixed reference domain with random coefficients. We give conditions on the mapping and the input data under which we can prove the well-posedness of the problems and give a posteriori error estimates for the finite element approximation of the first term in the expansion. Finally, we consider the heat equation with random Robin boundary conditions. For this parabolic problem, the time discretization brings an additional source of error that is accounted for in the error analysis. The second part of this work consists in the analysis of a random elliptic diffusion problem that is approximated in the physical space by the finite element method and in the stochastic space by the stochastic collocation method on a sparse grid. Considering a random diffusion coefficient with affine dependence on a vector of independent random variables, we derive a residual-based a posteriori error estimate that controls the two sources of error. The stochastic error estimator is then used to drive an adaptive sparse grid algorithm which aims at alleviating the so-called curse of dimensionality inherent to tensor grids. Several numerical examples are given to illustrate the performance of the adaptive procedure.

EPFL2016

Dynamical System Modeling of Self-Regulated Systems Undergoing Multiple Excitations: First Order Differential Equation Approach

Julien Gilles Edgar Gateau

This article proposes a dynamical system modeling approach for the analysis of longitudinal data of self-regulated homeostatic systems experiencing multiple excitations. It focuses on the evolution of a signal (e.g., heart rate) before, during, and after excitations taking the system out of its equilibrium (e.g., physical effort during cardiac stress testing). Such approach can be applied to a broad range of outcomes such as physiological processes in medicine and psychosocial processes in social sciences, and it allows to extract simple characteristics of the signal studied. The model is based on a first order linear differential equation with constant coefficients defined by three main parameters corresponding to the initial equilibrium value, the dynamic characteristic time, and the reaction to the excitation. Assuming the presence of interindividual variability (random effects) on these three parameters, we propose a two-step procedure to estimate them. We then compare the results of this analysis to several other estimation procedures in a simulation study that clarifies under which conditions parameters are accurately estimated. Finally, applications of this model are illustrated using cardiology data recorded during effort tests.

ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD2020

Structure-preserving approaches and data-driven closure modeling for model order reduction

Nicolò Ripamonti

In this thesis, we propose model order reduction techniques for high-dimensional PDEs that preserve structures of the original problems and develop a closure modeling framework leveraging the Mori-Zwanzig formalism and recurrent neural networks. Since high-fidelity approximations of PDEs often result in a large number of degrees of freedom, the need for iterative evaluations for numerical optimizations and rapid feedback is computationally challenging.The first part of this thesis is devoted to conserving the high-dimensional equation's invariants, symmetries, and structures during the reduction process. Traditional reduction techniques are not guaranteed to yield stable reduced systems, even if the target problem is stable. In the context of fluid flows, the skew-symmetric structure of the problem entails the preservation of the kinetic energy of the system. By preserving the same structure at the level of the reduced model, we obtain enhanced stability, and accuracy and the reduced model acquires physical significance by preserving a surrogate of the energy of the original problem. Next, we focus on Hamiltonian systems, which, being driven by symmetry, are a source of great interest in the reduction community. It is well known that the breaking of these symmetries in the reduced model is accompanied by a blowup of the system energy and flow volume. In this thesis, geometric reduced models for Hamiltonian systems are further developed and combined with the dynamically orthogonal methods, addressing the poor reducibility in time of advection-dominated problems. The reduced solution is expressed as a linear combination of a finite number of modes and coincides with the symplectic projection of the high-fidelity Hamiltonian problem onto the tangent space of the approximating manifold. An error surrogate is used to monitor the approximation ability of the reduced model and make a change in the rank of the approximating system if necessary. The method is further developed through a combination of DEIM and DMD to reduce non-polynomial nonlinearities while preserving the symplectic structure of the problem and applied to the Vlasov-Poisson system.In the second part of the thesis, we consider several data-driven methods to address the poor accuracy in the under-resolved regime for Galerkin reduced models via a closure term. The closure term is developed systematically from the Mori-Zwanzig formalism by introducing projection operators on the spaces of resolved and unresolved scales, thus resulting in an additional memory integral term. The interaction between different scales turns out to be nonlocal in time and dominated by a high-dimensional orthogonal dynamics equation, which cannot be solved precisely and efficiently. Several classical methods in the field of statistical mechanics are used to approximate the memory term, exploiting the finiteness of the memory kernel support. We conclude this thesis by showing through numerical experiments how long short-term memory networks, i.e., machine learning structures characterized by feedback connections, represent a valid tool for approximating the additional memory term.