Polynomial Chaos Expansion of Random Coefficients and the Solution of Stochastic Partial Differential Equations in the Tensor Train Format

Abstract

We apply the tensor train (TT) decomposition to construct the tensor product polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) of a random field, to solve the stochastic elliptic diffusion PDE with the stochastic Galerkin discretization, and to compute some quantities of interest (mean, variance, and exceedance probabilities). We assume that the random diffusion coefficient is given as a smooth transformation of a Gaussian random field. In this case, the PCE is delivered by a complicated formula, which lacks an analytic TT representation. To construct its TT approximation numerically, we develop the new block TT cross algorithm, a method that computes the whole TT decomposition from a few evaluations of the PCE formula. The new method is conceptually similar to the adaptive cross approximation in the TT format but is more efficient when several tensors must be stored in the same TT representation, which is the case for the PCE. In addition, we demonstrate how to assemble the stochastic Galerkin matrix and to compute the s...