Probabilistic surrogate models for uncertainty analysis: Dimension reduction‐based polynomial chaos expansion

Abstract

SummaryThis paper presents an approach for efficient uncertainty analysis (UA) using an intrusive generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) expansion. The key step of the gPC‐based uncertainty quantification (UQ) is the stochastic Galerkin (SG) projection, which can convert a stochastic model into a set of coupled deterministic models. The SG projection generally yields a high‐dimensional integration problem with respect to the number of random variables used to describe the parametric uncertainties in a model. However, when the number of uncertainties is large and when the governing equation of the system is highly nonlinear, the SG approach‐based gPC can be challenging to derive explicit expressions for the gPC coefficients because of the low convergence in the SG projection. To tackle this challenge, we propose to use a bivariate dimension reduction method (BiDRM) in this work to approximate a high‐dimensional integral in SG projection with a few one‐ and two‐dimensional integrations. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated with three different examples, including chemical reactions and cell signaling. As compared to other UA methods, such as the Monte Carlo simulations and nonintrusive stochastic collocation (SC), the proposed method shows its superior performance in terms of computational efficiency and UA accuracy.