Traveling Wave Solutions of Partial Differential Equations via Neural Networks

Abstract: This paper focuses on how to approximate traveling wave solutions for various kinds of partial differential equations via artificial neural networks. A traveling wave solution is hard to obtain with traditional numerical methods when the corresponding wave speed is unknown in advance. We propose a novel method to approximate both the traveling wave solution and the unknown wave speed via a neural network and an additional free parameter. We proved that under a mild assumption, the neural network solution converges to the analytic solution and the free parameter accurately approximates the wave speed as the corresponding loss tends to zero for the Keller-Segel equation. We also demonstrate in the experiments that reducing loss through training assures an accurate approximation of the traveling wave solution and the wave speed for the Keller-Segel equation, the Allen-Cahn model with relaxation, and the Lotka-Volterra competition model.