Multilevel Monte Carlo Finite Element Method for A Stochastic Optimal Control Problem

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the implementation of multi-level Monte Carlo method to a stochastic optimal control problem with log-normal coefficients and its surrogate model problem. From the perspective of two optimization problems, i.e., minimizing the accuracy using a fixed computational cost and minimizing the total computational cost to attain a given accuracy, we derive formulas to determine the optimal sample sizes for each level of multi-level Monte Carlo method. Furthermore, we put forward the multi-level Monte Carlo algorithm for our stochastic optimal control problem and some tricks to deal with the multi-level log-normal coefficients. Finally, we present the numerical results of both the elliptic SPDEs and our control problem to validate the effectiveness over the traditional Monte Carlo method.