In many situations across computational science and engineering, multiple computational models are available that describe a system of interest. These different models have varying evaluation costs and varying fidelities. Typically, a computationally expensive high-fidelity model describes the system with the accuracy required by the current application at hand, while lower-fidelity models are less accurate but computationally cheaper than the high-fidelity model. Outer-loop applications, such as optimization, inference, and uncertainty quantification, require multiple model evaluations at many different inputs, which often leads to computational demands that exceed available resources if only the high-fidelity model is used. This work surveys multifidelity methods that accelerate the solution of outer-loop applications by combining high-fidelity and low-fidelity model evaluations, where the low-fidelity evaluations arise from an explicit low-fidelity model (e.g., a simplified physics approximation, a reduced model, a data-fit surrogate, etc.) that approximates the same output quantity as the high-fidelity model. The overall premise of these multifidelity methods is that low-fidelity models are leveraged for speedup while the high-fidelity model is kept in the loop to establish accuracy and/or convergence guarantees. We categorize multifidelity methods according to three classes of strategies: adaptation, fusion, and filtering. The paper reviews multifidelity methods in the outer-loop contexts of uncertainty propagation, inference, and optimization.

This work presents a nonintrusive projection-based model reduction approach for full models based on time-dependent partial differential equations. Projection-based model reduction constructs the operators of a reduced model by projecting the equations of the full model onto a reduced space. Traditionally, this projection is intrusive, which means that the full-model operators are required either explicitly in an assembled form or implicitly through a routine that returns the action of the operators on a given vector; however, in many situations the full model is given as a black box that computes trajectories of the full-model states and outputs for given initial conditions and inputs, but does not provide the full-model operators. Our nonintrusive operator inference approach infers approximations of the reduced operators from the initial conditions, inputs, trajectories of the states, and outputs of the full model, without requiring the full-model operators. Our operator inference is applicable to full models that are linear in the state or have a low-order polynomial nonlinear term. The inferred operators are the solution of a least-squares problem and converge, with sufficient state trajectory data, in the Frobenius norm to the reduced operators that would be obtained via an intrusive projection of the full-model operators. Our numerical results demonstrate operator inference on a linear climate model and on a tubular reactor model with a polynomial nonlinear term of third order.

Abstract. This work presents an optimal model management strategy that exploits multifidelity surrogate models to accelerate the estimation of statistics of outputs of computationally expensive high-fidelity models. Existing acceleration methods typically exploit a multilevel hierarchy of surrogate models that follow a known rate of error decay and computational costs; however, a general collection of surrogate models, which may include projection-based reduced models, data-fit models, support vector machines, and simplified-physics models, does not necessarily give rise to such a hierarchy. Our multifidelity approach provides a framework to combine an arbitrary number of surrogate models of any type. Instead of relying on error and cost rates, an optimization problem balances the number of model evaluations across the high-fidelity and surrogate models with respect to error and costs. We show that a unique analytic solution of the model management optimization problem exists under mild conditions on the models. Our multifidelity method makes occasional recourse to the high-fidelity model; in doing so it provides an unbiased estimator of the statistics of the high-fidelity model, even in the absence of error bounds and error estimators for the surrogate models. Numerical experiments with linear and nonlinear examples show that speedups by orders of magnitude are obtained compared to Monte Carlo estimation that invokes a single model only. 1. Introduction. Multilevel techniques have a long and successful history in computational science and engineering, e.g., multigrid for solving systems of equations [8,25,9], multilevel discretizations for representing functions [50,18,10], and multilevel Monte Carlo and multilevel stochastic collocation for estimating mean solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) with stochastic parameters [27,22,45]. These multilevel techniques typically start with a fine-grid discretization-a high-fidelity model-of the underlying PDE or function. The fine-grid discretization is chosen to guarantee an approximation of the output of interest with the accuracy required by the current problem at hand. Additionally, a hierarchy of coarser discretizations-lowerfidelity surrogate models-is constructed, where a parameter (e.g., mesh width) controls the trade-off between error and computational costs. Changing this parameter gives rise to a multilevel hierarchy of discretizations with known error and cost rates. Multilevel techniques use these error and cost rates to distribute the computational work among the discretizations in the hierarchy, shifting most of the work onto the

a b s t r a c tSparse grids allow one to employ grid-based discretization methods in data-driven problems. We present an extension of the classical sparse grid approach that allows us to tackle highdimensional problems by spatially adaptive refinement, modified ansatz functions, and efficient regularization techniques. The competitiveness of this method is shown for typical benchmark problems with up to 166 dimensions for classification in data mining, pointing out properties of sparse grids in this context. To gain insight into the adaptive refinement and to examine the scope for further improvements, the approximation of non-smooth indicator functions with adaptive sparse grids has been studied as a model problem. As an example for an improved adaptive grid refinement, we present results for an edge-detection strategy.

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