A sparse data-driven polynomial chaos expansion method for uncertainty propagation

The data-driven polynomial chaos expansion (DD-PCE) method is claimed to be a more general approach of uncertainty propagation (UP). However, as a common problem of all the full PCE approaches, the size of polynomial terms in the full DD-PCE model is significantly increased with the dimension of random inputs and the order of PCE model, which would greatly increase the computational cost especially for high-dimensional and highly non-linear problems. Therefore, a sparse DD-PCE is developed by employing the least angle regression technique and a stepwise regression strategy to adaptively remove some insignificant terms. Through comparative studies between sparse DD-PCE and the full DD-PCE on three mathematical examples with random input of raw data, common and nontrivial distributions, and a ten-bar structure problem for UP, it is observed that generally both methods yield comparably accurate results, while the computational cost is significantly reduced by sDD-PCE especially for high-dimensional problems, which demonstrates the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed method.