Speaker: Mariarosa Mazza Affiliation: Università dell'Insubria Venue: Aula Magna, Dipartimento di Matematica Time: Venerdì, 19/11/2021, 10:00
Title: Caputo and Riemann-Liouville fractional derivatives: a matrix comparison
Fractional derivatives are a mathematical tool that received much attention in the last decades because of their non-local behavior which has been demonstrated to be useful when modeling anomalous diffusion phenomena appearing, e.g., in imaging or electrophysiology. Two of the most famous definitions of fractional derivatives are the Riemann- Liouville and the Caputo ones. The two formulations are related by a well-known formula that expresses a Riemann-Liouville derivative as a Caputo one plus a term that depends on the function and its derivatives at the boundary. As a consequence of this relation, Riemann-Liouville and Caputo derivatives coincide only for sufficiently smooth functions that satisfy homogeneous conditions at the boundary. Aiming at uncovering how much this discrepancy reflects on their discretized counterparts, we focus on the relation between Riemann-Liouville and Caputo derivatives once approximated by a collocation method based on B-splines, i.e., high order finite elements with maximum regularity. We show that when the fractional order α ranges in (1,2) their difference in terms of matrices corresponds to a rank-1 correction whose spectral norm increases with the mesh-size n and is o(√n). On one hand, this implies that the spectral distribution for the B-spline collocation matrices corresponding to the Riemann-Liouville and Caputo derivatives coincide; on the other hand, the presence of the rank-1 correction makes the Caputo matrices worse conditioned for α tending to 1 due to a larger maximum singular value. Some linear algebra consequences of all this knowledge are discussed, and a selection of numerical experiments that validate our findings is provided together with a numerical study of the approximation behavior of B-spline collocation.
Meeting link: https://hausdorff.dm.unipi.it/b/leo-xik-xu4