relative kl divergence
Bounded KRnet and its applications to density estimation and approximation
Zeng, Li, Wan, Xiaoliang, Zhou, Tao
In this paper, we develop an invertible mapping, called B-KRnet, on a bounded domain and apply it to density estimation/approximation for data or the solutions of PDEs such as the Fokker-Planck equation and the Keller-Segel equation. Similar to KRnet, the structure of B-KRnet adapts the triangular form of the Knothe-Rosenblatt rearrangement into a normalizing flow model. The main difference between B-KRnet and KRnet is that B-KRnet is defined on a hypercube while KRnet is defined on the whole space, in other words, we introduce a new mechanism in B-KRnet to maintain the exact invertibility. Using B-KRnet as a transport map, we obtain an explicit probability density function (PDF) model that corresponds to the pushforward of a prior (uniform) distribution on the hypercube. To approximate PDFs defined on a bounded computational domain, B-KRnet is more effective than KRnet. By coupling KRnet and B-KRnet, we can also define a deep generative model on a high-dimensional domain where some dimensions are bounded and other dimensions are unbounded. A typical case is the solution of the stationary kinetic Fokker-Planck equation, which is a PDF of position and momentum. Based on B-KRnet, we develop an adaptive learning approach to approximate partial differential equations whose solutions are PDFs or can be regarded as a PDF. In addition, we apply B-KRnet to density estimation when only data are available. A variety of numerical experiments is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of B-KRnet.
Adaptive deep density approximation for fractional Fokker-Planck equations
Zeng, Li, Wan, Xiaoliang, Zhou, Tao
In this work, we propose adaptive deep learning approaches based on normalizing flows for solving fractional Fokker-Planck equations (FPEs). The solution of a FPE is a probability density function (PDF). Traditional mesh-based methods are ineffective because of the unbounded computation domain, a large number of dimensions and the nonlocal fractional operator. To this end, we represent the solution with an explicit PDF model induced by a flow-based deep generative model, simplified KRnet, which constructs a transport map from a simple distribution to the target distribution. We consider two methods to approximate the fractional Laplacian. One method is the Monte Carlo approximation. The other method is to construct an auxiliary model with Gaussian radial basis functions (GRBFs) to approximate the solution such that we may take advantage of the fact that the fractional Laplacian of a Gaussian is known analytically. Based on these two different ways for the approximation of the fractional Laplacian, we propose two models, MCNF and GRBFNF, to approximate stationary FPEs and MCTNF to approximate time-dependent FPEs. To further improve the accuracy, we refine the training set and the approximate solution alternately. A variety of numerical examples is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our adaptive deep density approaches.
Solving time dependent Fokker-Planck equations via temporal normalizing flow
Feng, Xiaodong, Zeng, Li, Zhou, Tao
The Fokker-Planck (FP) equations, which describe the time evolution of probability density functions (PDFs) of complex stochastic systems, have been widely used in different fields such as physical and biological modelling[31][34]. Solving the FP equations numerically has been an important research topic in the past few decades. Generally, there are two main ways to obtain the PDFs of stochastic dynamics: solving the FP equations directly, or evaluating the transition probability density of the associated stochastic differential equations(SDEs). Traditional numerical methods for doing this include the finite element methods [4], the finite difference methods [19], the path integral methods [37], to name just a few. One of the biggest difficulties of these approaches is that either discretizition of a high dimensional (unbounded) physical space is needed, or a large number of sample paths via Monte Carlo method [12] should be used. In recent years, machine learning techniques have been widely used to solve partial differential equations (PDEs), see e.g.