Wikidata:Property proposal/convergence rate

order of convergence (changed from "convergence rate") edit

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Natural science

   Withdrawn
Descriptionthe rate at which a sequence or numerical method converges
Representsrate of convergence (Q1783502)
Data typeItem
Domainnumerical method (Q24262840) sequence (Q133250)
Allowed valuesinstancesof big O notation (Q269878)
Example 1Euler method (Q868454)  of (P642) local error (Q97796690) relative to (P2210) <step size>
Example 2Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm (Q2877013) → quadratic? to-do: look up convergence rate of BFGS
Example 3gradient descent (Q1199743) → <sublinear> <with respect to> <iteration count> <when applied to> <convex function> [1]
Example 4gradient descent (Q1199743) → <linear> <with respect to> <iteration count> <when applied to> <strictly convex function> [2]
Example 5Newton's method in optimization (Q17086396) → <quadraticall> <when applied to> <convex function> [3]
See alsoworst-case space complexity (P3755), average space complexity (P3757), best-case space complexity (P3756), worst-case time complexity (P3752), average time complexity (P3754) best-case time complexity (P3753), big O notation (Q269878)

Motivation edit

Well-posed numerical methods (theoretically) converge to the exact solution as  . For discretized methods,   is the grid size of the discretization and  . For iterative methods,   could be the number of iterations and  . Alternatively, for iterative numerical methods for solving differential equations,   is the tiem-step size and  . In each case, there is an upper bound on the on the error of the method as a function of   as  . It would be useful to have methods categorized according to this property.

Specifically, I am proposing that we add a property whose subject is the big-O order of convergence for the method. That is, we would set <order of convergence> <g(n)> where g(n) is a function such   if  

There are a lot of definitions that are used similarly, so I'm going to list them here and we'll try to sort them out.

  • Rate of convergence: if a sequence converges linearly,   is called the rate of convergence
  • If a sequence converges to a limit, then r

The following excerpt from [4] provides clear definitions of order and rate of convergences.

"whether this iteration will converge, and, if so, the rate of convergence. Specifically we use the following to represent how quickly the error \(e_{n}=x_{n}-x^{*}\) converges to zero:   Here \(p \geq 1\) is called the order of convergence, the constant \(\mu\) is the rate of comergence or asymptotic error constant."

I think it makes sense to create an order of convergence (OC) property, but not a rate of convergence (RC). The reason for this, is that OC is (1) a much more important property of an algorithm and (2) there will only be (in practice) a limited number of values. We'll have logarithmically, sublinear, linear, quadratic, cubic, quartic, and maybe a few more. Whereas RC could be any real number.

The-erinaceous-one (talk) 07:47, 31 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]


Discussion edit