The Curse of Dimensionality for Numerical Integration of Smooth Functions II

Aicke Hinrichs, Erich Novak, Mario Ullrich, Henryk Wozniakowski

Published 2013-04-11, updated 2013-11-12Version 2

We prove the curse of dimensionality in the worst case setting for numerical integration for a number of classes of smooth $d$-variate functions. Roughly speaking, we consider different bounds for the derivatives of $f \in C^k(D_d)$ and ask whether the curse of dimensionality holds for the respective classes of functions. We always assume that $D_d \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ has volume one and consider various values of $k$ including the case $k=\infty$ which corresponds to infinitely many differentiable functions. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions, and in some cases a full characterization for the curse of dimensionality. For infinitely many differentiable functions we prove the curse if the bounds on the successive derivatives are appropriately large. The proof technique is based on a volume estimate of a neighborhood of the convex hull of $n$ points which decays exponentially fast if $n$ is small relative to $d$. For $k=\infty$, we also also study conditions for quasi-polynomial, weak and uniform weak tractability.