Effective rates for continuous-time quasi-Fej\'er monotone dynamical systems

Abstract

We provide quantitative convergence results for continuous-time dynamical systems in metric spaces that satisfy a continuous-time analog of quasi-Fej\'er monotonicity. More precisely, we provide a (strong) convergence result for such dynamical systems over compact metric spaces which is quantitatively outfitted with a continuous-time rate of metastability, which moreover can be explicitly and effectively constructed in a very uniform way, only depending on a few moduli representing quantitative witnesses to key properties of the dynamical system and a measure for the compactness of the space. We further show how this convergence result can be extended to non-compact spaces under a regularity assumption of the associated problem, where moreover rates of convergence can then be explicitly constructed which are similarly uniform. In both cases, already the associated ``infinitary'' convergence result is qualitatively novel in its present generality. Beyond this abstract quantitative theory for such dynamical systems, we motivate how the presently studied continuous-time variant of quasi-Fej\'er monotonicity naturally occurs as a unifying property of many dynamical systems and differential equations and inclusions, and in that way can be used to provide a comprehensive quantitative theory for many such dynamical systems. We illustrate this with three case studies for both classical first- and second-order dynamical systems in Hilbert spaces as well as (generalized) gradient flows and associated semigroups in nonlinear Hadamard spaces.