A comprehensive study of boundary conditions when solving PDEs by DNNs

Jingrun Chen, Rui Du, Keke Wu

Published 2020-05-10Version 1

Recent years have witnessed growing interests in solving partial differentialequationsbydeepneuralnetworks,especiallyinthehigh-dimensional case. Unlike classical numerical methods, such as finite difference method and finite element method, the enforcement of boundary conditions in deep neural networks is highly nontrivial. One general strategy is to use the penalty method. In the work, we conduct a comprehensive study of four different boundary conditions, i.e., Dirichlet, Neumann, Robin, and periodic boundary conditions, using two representative methods: deep Ritz method and deep Galerkin method. It is thought that deep Galerkin method works better for smooth solutions while deep Ritz method works better for low-regularity solutions. However, by a number of examples, we observe that deep Ritz method can outperform deep Galerkin method with a clear dependence of dimensionality even for smooth solutions and deep Galerkin method can also outperform deep Ritz method for lowregularity solutions. Besides, in some cases, when the boundary condition can be implemented in an exact manner, we find that such a strategy not only provides a better approximate solution but also facilitates the training process.