A Rate of Convergence of Physics Informed Neural Networks for the Linear Second Order Elliptic PDEs

Abstract

In recent years, physical informed neural networks (PINNs) have been shown to be a powerful tool for solving PDEs empirically. However, numerical analysis of PINNs is still missing. In this paper, we prove the convergence rate to PINNs for the second order elliptic equations with Dirichlet boundary condition, by establishing the upper bounds on the number of training samples, depth and width of the deep neural networks to achieve desired accuracy. The error of PINNs is decomposed into approximation error and statistical error, where the approximation error is given in $C^2$ norm with ReLU$^3$ networks (deep network with activation function max$\{0,x^3\}$) and the statistical error is estimated by Rademacher complexity. We derive the bound on the Rademacher complexity of the non-Lipschitz composition of gradient norm with ReLU$^3$ network, which is of immense independent interest.