GMC-PINNs: A new general Monte Carlo PINNs method for solving fractional partial differential equations on irregular domains

Abstract

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been widely used for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) of different types, including fractional PDEs (fPDES) [29]. Herein, we propose a new general (quasi) Monte Carlo PINN for solving fPDEs on irregular domains. Specifically, instead of approximating fractional derivatives by Monte Carlo approximations of integrals as was done previously in [31], we use a more general Monte Carlo approximation method to solve different fPDEs, which is valid for fractional differentiation under any definition. Moreover, based on the ensemble probability density function, the generated nodes are all located in denser regions near the target point where we perform the differentiation. This has an unexpected connection with known finite difference methods on non-equidistant or nested grids, and hence our method inherits their advantages. At the same time, the generated nodes exhibit a block-like dense distribution, leading to a good computational efficiency of this approach. We present the framework for using this algorithm and apply it to several examples. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of GMC-PINNs in dealing with irregular domain problems and show a higher computational efficiency compared to the original fPINN method. We also include comparisons with the Monte Carlo fPINN [31]. Finally, we use examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in dealing with fuzzy boundary location problems, and then use the method to solve the coupled 3D fractional Bloch-Torrey equation defined in the ventricular domain of the human brain, and compare the results with classical numerical methods.