Local Polynomial Regression Solution for Partial Differential Equations with Initial and Boundary Values
Abstract
Local polynomial regression (LPR) is applied to solve the partial differential equations (PDEs). Usually, the solutions of the problems are separation of variables and eigenfunction expansion methods, so we are rarely able to find analytical solutions. Consequently, we must try to find numerical solutions. In this paper, two test problems are considered for the numerical illustration of the method. Comparisons are made between the exact solutions and the results of the LPR. The results of applying this theory to the PDEs reveal that LPR method possesses very high accuracy, adaptability, and efficiency; more importantly, numerical illustrations indicate that the new method is much more efficient than B-splines and AGE methods derived for the same purpose.
1. Introduction
2. Bivariate Local Polynomial Regression
Bivariate local polynomial regression is an attractive method both from theoretical and practical point of view. Multivariate local polynomial method has a small mean squared error compared with the Nadaraya-Watson estimator which leads to an undesirable form of the bias and the Gasser-Muller estimator which has to pay a price in variance when dealing with a random design model. Multivariate local polynomial fitting also has other advantages. The method adapts to various types of designs such as random and fixed designs and highly clustered and nearly uniform designs. Furthermore, there is an absence of boundary effects: the bias at the boundary stays automatically of the same order as the interior, without the use of specific boundary kernels. The local polynomial approximation approach is appealing on general scientific grounds; the least squares principle to be applied opens the way to a wealth of statistical knowledge and thus easy generalizations. All the above-mentioned assertions or advantages can be found in literatures [6–10]. The basic idea of multivariate local polynomial regression is also proposed in [11–14]. In this section, we briefly outline the idea of the extension of bivariate local polynomial fitting to bivariate regression.
2.1. Parameters Estimations and Selections
There are many of the embedding dimensions algorithms [15, 16]. In univariate series , a popular method that is used for finding the embedding dimensions mi is the so-called false nearest-neighbor method [17, 18]. Here, we apply this method to the bivariate case.
But the optimal bandwidth cannot be solved directly. So we discuss how to get the asymptotically optimal bandwidth. We make use of searching method to select bandwidth. When the bandwidth h varies from small to big, compared with the values of the objective function, we can choose the smallest bandwidth to ensure the minimum value of the objective function. So the smallest bandwidth is the optimal bandwidth.
Given hl = Clhmin , where hmin is minimum, Cl is efficient of expansion. We search the bandwidth h to ensure the objective function value of minimum in district [hmin , hmax ], where the objective function stands for the mean square error (MSE).
Another issue in multivariate local polynomial fitting is the choice of the order of the polynomial. Since the modeling bias is primarily controlled by the bandwidth, this issue is less crucial, however. For a given bandwidth h, a large value of d would expectedly reduce the modeling bias but would cause a large variance and a considerable computational cost. Since the bandwidth is used to control the modeling complexity, and due to the sparsity of local data in multidimensional space, a higher-order polynomial is rarely used. So, we apply the local quadratic regression to fit the model (i.e., p = 2,3). The third issue is the selection of the kernel function. In this paper, we choose the optimal spherical Epanechnikov kernel function [6, 7] which minimizes the asymptotic mean square error (MSE) of the resulting multivariate local polynomial estimators, as our kernel function.
3. LPR Solutions for PDE
4. Numerical Illustrations and Discussions
In this section we consider the numerical results obtained by the schemes discussed previously by applying them to the following second-order and fourth-order initial boundary value problems. All computations are carried out using MATLAB 7.0.
Example 4.1. First, we consider the following second-order nonhomogeneous PDEs:
The exact solution for problems (4.3) is u(x, t) = tsin x. We solve Example 4.1 with n = 20,30,50 by choosing p = 3,4 and various values of parameters Hi presented in Table 1. The errors in the solutions are computed by our method (3.9). In Table 1, p = 3,4. Given n = 20, p = 3,4, it is found that the magnitude of MSE is between 10 to the power of −3 and 10 to the power of −4. Given n = 30, p = 3,4, it can be seen that the magnitude of MSE is between 10 to the power of −4 and 10 to the power of −7. However, by setting up n = 50, p = 3,4, it is obvious that the magnitude of MSE is between 10 to the power of −5 and 10 to the power of −8. We conclude that MSE decreases with the increase of the value of n the value of order p has no much influence on MSE for a large value of β. Consider parameter H; specifically, MSEs get up to minimum for p = 3, n = 20 when H3 = 1/25, for p = 3, n = 30 when H4 = 3/100, for p = 3, n = 50 when H5 = 1/40. We can find that the optimal bandwidth H locates in district [0.025I2, 0.04I2] by using method (2.12)-(2.13) for n = 20, 30, 50. For p = 4, there exists the same situation with p = 3. Here, I2 is a unit matrix of two orders. The fitting figure is depicted in Figure 1 using matlab 7.0.
Parameters (p, Hi) | MSE (n = 20) | MSE (n = 30) | MSE (n = 50) |
---|---|---|---|
p = 3, H1 = (11 /100) I2 | 8.5223 × 10−3 | 6.5223 × 10−4 | 6.3252 × 10−5 |
p = 3, H2 = (2 /25) I2 | 3.0309 × 10−3 | 4.2541 × 10−4 | 9.7206 × 10−6 |
p = 3, H3 = (1 /25) I2 | 1.1268 × 10−4 | 8.3418 × 10−5 | 6.0211 × 10−6 |
p = 3, H4 = (3 /100) I2 | 5.3082 × 10−4 | 5.2087 × 10−5 | 1.1528 × 10−6 |
p = 3, H5 = (1/40) I2 | 6.9123 × 10−4 | 5.6021 × 10−5 | 3.9107 × 10−7 |
p = 3, H6 = (1 /75) I2 | 3.3082 × 10−3 | 2.8339 × 10−5 | 1.8815 × 10−6 |
p = 4, H1 = (11 /100) I2 | 4.1004 × 10−4 | 6.6033 × 10−6 | 5.8311 × 10−7 |
p = 4, H2 = (2 /25) I2 | 1.8791 × 10−4 | 2.2416 × 10−6 | 3.4525 × 10−7 |
p = 4, H3 = (1 /25) I2 | 6.6568 × 10−5 | 9.5066 × 10−7 | 3.0373 × 10−7 |
p = 4, H4 = (3 /100) I2 | 9.0893 × 10−5 | 7.3137 × 10−6 | 9.7815 × 10−8 |
p = 4, H5 = (1/40) I2 | 5.9803 × 10−4 | 5.6401 × 10−6 | 4.1266 × 10−8 |
p = 4, H6 = (1 /75) I2 | 5.7911 × 10−4 | 7.3452 × 10−6 | 2.3098 × 10−7 |

Example 4.2. Next we consider the following fourth-order nonhomogeneous PDEs:
The exact solution for problems (4.4), (4.5), and (4.6) is u(x, t) = sin πxcos t. This problem has been solved by several authors [19, 20]. Here, we try to solve Example 4.2 with n = 30,50 by choosing p = 3,4 and various values of parameters H presented in Table 2. The errors in the solutions are computed by our method (3.9); the splines method for three kinds of values of p, q, s, σ, h in [19], and the AGE method for two kinds of values of its parameters in [20] have been presented in Table 2. In Table 1, p = 3,4. Given n = 30, it is found that the magnitude of MSE is between 10 to the power of −4 and 10 to the power of −6 for p = 3, between 10 to the power of −6 and 10 to the power of −8 for p = 4. We can see the value of order p has a little influence on MSE. Consider parameter H; specifically, MSEs get up to minimum for p = 3, n = 20 when H3 = 1/25, for p = 3, n = 30 when H4 = 3/100, for p = 3, n = 50 when H5 = 1/40. Similar to Example 4.1, we can also acknowledge the optimal bandwidth H exists in district [0.025I2, 0.03I2] by using method (2.12)-(2.13), for n = 30 and n = 50 given p = 4,5. Furthermore, we have tabulated the absolute errors (AEs) at x = 0.10,0.20 for different combination of parameters p, H for n = 30 and n = 50, respectively. Given n = 30, p = 4, 5, the magnitude of AE is between 10 to the power of −3 and 10 to the power of −6 at point x = 0.1, and given n = 50, p = 4, 5, the magnitude of AE is between 10 to the power of −5 and 10 to the power of −7 at point x = 0.2. Here, I2 is a unit matrix of two orders. The fitting figure is also illustrated in Figure 2 using matlab 7.0.
Parameters (h, Hi) | MSE (n = 30) | AE (x = 0.10, n = 30) | AE (x = 0.20, n = 50) |
---|---|---|---|
p = 4, H1 = (11 /100) I2, | 2.3109 × 10−4 | 4.7882 × 10−3 | 9.4388 × 10−5 |
p = 4, H2 = (2 /25) I2, | 4.1493 × 10−4 | 3.1431 × 10−3 | 4.6412 × 10−5 |
p = 4, H3 = (1 /25) I2, | 3.8981 × 10−5 | 6.9083 × 10−4 | 1.0603 × 10−5 |
p = 4, H4 = (3 /100) I2, | 9.2391 × 10−6 | 1.1425 × 10−4 | 7.5229 × 10−6 |
p = 4, H5 = (1 /40) I2, | 9.0117 × 10−6 | 6.8858 × 10−4 | 9.1029 × 10−7 |
p = 4, H6 = (3 /100) I2, | 7.3249 × 10−6 | 9.4551 × 10−5 | 2.1002 × 10−6 |
p = 5, H1 = (11 /100) I2, | 7.0113 × 10−7 | 8.9211 × 10−5 | 6.8564 × 10−6 |
p = 5, H2 = (2 /25) I2, | 4.5881 × 10−7 | 7.8423 × 10−5 | 5.0705 × 10−6 |
p = 5, H3 = (1 /25) I2, | 2.1062 × 10−7 | 2.6065 × 10−5 | 9.6552 × 10−7 |
p = 5, H4 = (3 /100) I2, | 9.7922 × 10−8 | 5.8232 × 10−6 | 8.2302 × 10−7 |
p = 5, H5 = (1 /40) I2, | 3.8717 × 10−6 | 4.2410 × 10−5 | 3.0671 × 10−7 |
p = 5, H6 = (1/75) I2, | 8.9821 × 10−6 | 7.9102 × 10−5 | 6.3409 × 10−6 |
Aziz et al. [19] (p, q, s, σ, h) | x = 0.10, steps = 10 | x = 0.20, steps = 16 | |
(0, 0, 1, 1/4, 1/20) | — | 1.5000 × 10−4 | 5.1000 × 10−5 |
(0, 1/6, 2/3, 1/4, 1/20) | 1.8000 × 10−5 | 8.0000 × 10−6 | |
(1/144, 5/36, 17/24, 1/4, 1/20) | 1.8000 × 10−5 | 7.9000 × 10−6 | |
Evans and Yousif [20] | — | 2.2000 × 10−4 | 4.1000 × 10−4 |
2.5000 × 10−5 | 4.7000 × 10−5 |

5. Conclusions
In this paper, LPR method can be applied for the numerical solution of some kinds of PDEs. We can also see that LPR method has been exploited to solve fifth-order boundary value problems [4] and Fredholm and Volterra integral equations [5] whose maximum absolute errors are very small and calculation processes are simple and feasible. Compared with the splines method [19] and the AGE method [20], LPR method converges to solutions with fewer number of nodes, and the maximum absolute errors are a little smaller. Moreover, it is more flexible to resolve problems just only adjusting parameters h, p. However, LPR methods have shortcomings which need more computation time compared with splines method [19] for the same problems, which can be tried to discuss and resolve afterward. In any case, it is more important that we can conclude LPR solution is a powerful tool for numerical solutions of differential equations with initial and boundary values.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation Projects of CQ CSTC of China (CSTC2010BB2310, CSTC2011jjA40033, CSTC2012jjA00037) and Chongqing CMEC Foundations of China (KJ080614, KJ120829).