We consider the application of multilevel Monte Carlo methods to elliptic partial differential equations with random coefficients. Such equations arise, for example, in stochastic groundwater ow modelling. Models for random coefficients frequently used in these applications, such as log-normal random fields with exponential covariance, lack uniform coercivity and boundedness with respect to the random parameter and have only limited spatial regularity. To give a rigorous bound on the cost of the multilevel Monte Carlo estimator to reach a desired accuracy, one needs to quantify the bias of the estimator. The bias, in this case, is the spatial discretisation error in the numerical solution of the partial differential equation. This thesis is concerned with establishing bounds on this discretisation error in the practically relevant and technically demanding case of coefficients which are not uniformly coercive or bounded with respect to the random parameter. Under mild assumptions on the regularity of the coefficient, we establish new results on the regularity of the solution for a variety of model problems. The most general case is that of a coefficient which is piecewise Hölder continuous with respect to a random partitioning of the domain. The established regularity of the solution is then combined with tools from classical discretisation error analysis to provide a full convergence analysis of the bias of the multilevel estimator for finite element and finite volume spatial discretisations. Our analysis covers as quantities of interest several spatial norms of the solution, as well as point evaluations of the solution and its gradient and any continuously Fréchet differentiable functional. Lastly, we extend the idea of multilevel Monte Carlo estimators to the framework of Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations. We develop a new multilevel version of a Metropolis Hastings algorithm, and provide a full convergence analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:577753 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Teckentrup, Aretha Leonore |
| Contributors | Scheichl, Robert |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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