Constructing QMC finite element methods for elliptic PDEs with random coefficients by a reduced CBC construction

Abstract

In the analysis of using quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods to approximate expectations of a linear functional of the solution of an elliptic PDE with random diffusion coefficient the sensitivity w.r.t. the parameters is often stated in terms of product-and-order-dependent (POD) weights. The (offline) fast component-by-component (CBC) construction of an $N$-point QMC method making use of these POD weights leads to a cost of $\mathcal{O}(s N \log(N) + s^2 N)$ with $s$ the parameter truncation dimension. When $s$ is large this cost is prohibitive. As an alternative Herrmann and Schwab introduced an analysis resulting in product weights to reduce the construction cost to $\mathcal{O}(s N \log(N))$. We here show how the reduced CBC method can be used for POD weights to reduce the cost to $\mathcal{O}(\sum_{j=1}^{\min\{s,s^*\}} (m-w_j+j) \, b^{m-w_j})$, where $N=b^m$ with prime $b$, $w_1 \le \cdots \le w_s$ are nonnegative integers and $s^*$ can be chosen much smaller than $s$ depending on the regularity of the random field expansion as such making it possible to use the POD weights directly. We show a total error estimate for using randomly shifted lattice rules constructed through the reduced CBC construction.