Control Variate Polynomial Chaos: Optimal Fusion of Sampling and Surrogates for Multifidelity Uncertainty Quantification

Abstract: We present a hybrid sampling-surrogate approach for reducing the computational expense of uncertainty quantification in nonlinear dynamical systems. Our motivation is to enable rapid uncertainty quantification in complex mechanical systems such as automotive propulsion systems. Our approach is to build upon ideas from multifidelity uncertainty quantification to leverage the benefits of both sampling and surrogate modeling, while mitigating their downsides. In particular, the surrogate model is selected to exploit problem structure, such as smoothness, and offers a highly correlated information source to the original nonlinear dynamical system. We utilize an intrusive generalized Polynomial Chaos surrogate because it avoids any statistical errors in its construction and provides analytic estimates of output statistics. We then leverage a Monte Carlo-based Control Variate technique to correct the bias caused by the surrogate approximation error. The primary theoretical contribution of this work is the analysis and solution of an estimator design strategy that optimally balances the computational effort needed to adapt a surrogate compared with sampling the original expensive nonlinear system. While previous works have similarly combined surrogates and sampling, to our best knowledge this work is the first to provide rigorous analysis of estimator design. We deploy our approach on multiple examples stemming from the simulation of mechanical automotive propulsion system models. We show that the estimator is able to achieve orders of magnitude reduction in mean squared error of statistics estimation in some cases under comparable costs of purely sampling or purely surrogate approaches.