An Adaptive sampling and domain learning strategy for multivariate function approximation on unknown domains

Abstract: Many problems in computational science and engineering can be described in terms of approximating a smooth function of $d$ variables, defined over an unknown domain of interest $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^d$, from sample data. Here both the curse of dimensionality ($d\gg 1$) and the lack of domain knowledge with $\Omega$ potentially irregular and/or disconnected are confounding factors for sampling-based methods. Na\"{i}ve approaches often lead to wasted samples and inefficient approximation schemes. For example, uniform sampling can result in upwards of 20\% wasted samples in some problems. In surrogate model construction in computational uncertainty quantification (UQ), the high cost of computing samples needs a more efficient sampling procedure. In the last years, methods for computing such approximations from sample data have been studied in the case of irregular domains. The advantages of computing sampling measures depending on an approximation space $P$ of $\dim(P)=N$ have been shown. In particular, such methods confer advantages such as stability and well-conditioning, with $\mathcal{O}(N\log(N))$ as sample complexity. The recently-proposed adaptive sampling for general domains (ASGD) strategy is one method to construct these sampling measures. The main contribution of this paper is to improve ASGD by adaptively updating the sampling measures over unknown domains. We achieve this by first introducing a general domain adaptivity strategy (GDAS), which approximates the function and domain of interest from sample points. Second, we propose adaptive sampling for unknown domains (ASUD), which generates sampling measures over a domain that may not be known in advance. Our results show that the ASUD approach consistently achieves the same or smaller errors as uniform sampling, but using fewer, and often significantly fewer evaluations.