In this paper, we consider the harmonic extension problem, which is widely used in many applications of machine learning. We formulate the harmonic extension as solving a Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary condition. We use the point integral method (PIM) to solve the Laplace-Beltrami equation. The basic idea of the PIM method is to approximate the Laplace equation using an integral equation, which is easy to be discretized from points. Based on the integral equation, we found that traditional graph Laplacian method (GLM) may fail to approximate the harmonic functions in the classical sense. For the Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary, we can prove the convergence of the point integral method. The point integral method is also very easy to implement, which only requires a minor modification of the graph Laplacian. One important application of the harmonic extension in machine learning is semi-supervised learning. We run a popular semi-supervised learning algorithm by Zhu et al. over a couple of well-known datasets and compare the performance of the aforementioned approaches. Our experiments show the PIM performs the best. We also apply PIM to an image recovery problem and show it outperforms GLM. Finally, on a model problem of Laplace-Beltrami equation with Dirichlet boundary, we prove the convergence of the point integral method.

This paper focuses on coordinate update methods, which are useful for solving problems involving large or high-dimensional datasets. They decompose a problem into simple subproblems, where each updates one, or a small block of, variables while fixing others. These methods can deal with linear and nonlinear mappings, smooth and nonsmooth functions, as well as convex and nonconvex problems. In addition, they are easy to parallelize. The great performance of coordinate update methods depends on solving simple sub-problems. To derive simple subproblems for several new classes of applications, this paper systematically studies coordinate-friendly operators that perform low-cost coordinate updates. Based on the discovered coordinate friendly operators, as well as operator splitting techniques, we obtain new coordinate update algorithms for a variety of problems in machine learning, image processing, as well as sub-areas of optimization. Several problems are treated with coordinate update for the first time in history. The obtained algorithms are scalable to large instances through parallel and even asynchronous computing. We present numerical examples to illustrate how effective these algorithms are.

We develop a method searching for quasi-conformal maps from point-cloud surfaces to Euclidean plane. The maps can be got by directly solving Beltrami equation with proper boundary condition or solving optimization problem of the variational formu- lation. The point integral methd (PIM) is used for discretization on point clouds. Numerical experiments suggest that the method converges as the density of points in- creases.

It is well-known that sparse grid algorithm has been widely accepted as an efficient tool to overcome the “curse of dimensionality" in some degree. In this note, we give the error estimate of hyperbolic cross (HC) approximations with all sorts of Askey polynomials. These polynomials are useful in generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) in the field of uncertainty quantification. The exponential convergences in both regular and optimized HC approximations have been shown under the condition that the random variable depends on the random inputs smoothly in some degree. Moreover, we apply gPC to numerically solve the ordinary differential equations with slightly higher dimensional random inputs. Both regular and optimized HC have been investigated with Laguerre-chaos, Charlier-chaos and Hermite-chaos in the numerical experiment. The discussion of the connection between the standard ANOVA approximation and Galerkin approximation is in the appendix.

An important property for finite difference schemes designed on curvilinear meshes is the exact preservation of free-stream solutions. This property is difficult to fulfill for high order conservative essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite difference schemes. In this paper we explore an alternative flux formulation for such finite difference schemes which can preserve free-stream solutions, based on the numerical technique for the metric terms, which can be applied to this alternative flux formulation but is difficult to be applied to the standard finite difference formulation. Free-stream and vortex preservation properties are investigated, and comparison with standard finite difference WENO schemes is made. Theoretical derivation and numerical results show that the finite difference WENO schemes based on the alternative flux formulation can preserve free-stream and vortex solutions on both stationary and dynamically generalized coordinate systems, hence giving much better performance than the standard finite difference WENO schemes for such problems.