Dynamical low rank approximation for uncertainty quantification of time-dependent problems

The quantification of uncertainties can be particularly challenging for problems requiring long-time integration as the structure of the random solution might considerably change over time. In this respect, dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA) is very appealing. It can be seen as a reduced basis method, thus solvable at a relatively low computational cost, in which the solution is expanded as a linear combination of a few deterministic functions with random coefficients. The distinctive feature of the DLRA is that both the deterministic functions and random coefficients are computed on the fly and are free to evolve in time, thus adjusting at each time to the current structure of the random solution. This is achieved by suitably projecting the dynamics onto the tangent space of a manifold consisting of all random functions with a fixed rank. In this thesis, we aim at further analysing and applying the DLR methods to time-dependent problems.

Our first work considers the DLRA of random parabolic equations and proposes a class of fully discrete numerical schemes. Similarly to the continuous DLRA, our schemes are shown to satisfy a discrete variational formulation. By exploiting this property, we establish the stability of our schemes: we show that our explicit and semi-implicit versions are conditionally stable under a ``parabolic'' type CFL condition which does not depend on the smallest singular value of the DLR solution; whereas our implicit scheme is unconditionally stable. Moreover, we show that, in certain cases, the semi-implicit scheme can be unconditionally stable if the randomness in the system is sufficiently small. The analysis is supported by numerical results showing the sharpness of the obtained stability conditions.

The discrete variational formulation is further applied in our second work, which derives a-priori and a-posteriori error estimates for the discrete DLRA of a random parabolic equation obtained by the three newly-proposed schemes. Under the assumption that the right-hand side of the dynamical system lies in the tangent space up to a small remainder, we show that the solution converges with standard convergence rates w.r.t. the time, spatial, and stochastic discretization parameters, with constants independent of singular values.

We follow by presenting a residual-based a-posteriori error estimation for a heat equation with a random forcing term and a random diffusion coefficient which is assumed to depend affinely on a finite number of independent random variables. The a-posteriori error estimate consists of four parts: the finite element method error, the time discretization error, the stochastic collocation error, and the rank truncation error. These estimators are then used to drive an adaptive choice of FE mesh, collocation points, time steps, and time-varying rank.

The last part of the thesis examines the idea of applying the DLR method in data assimilation problems, in particular the filtering problem. We p