Linear collective collocation and Galerkin approximations for parametric and stochastic elliptic PDEs

Consider the parametric elliptic problem \begin{equation} - \operatorname{dv} \big(a(y)(x)\nabla u(y)(x)\big) \ = \ f(x) \quad x \in D, \ y \in [-1,1]^\infty, \quad u|_{\partial D} \ = \ 0, \end{equation} where $D \subset {\mathbb R}^m$ is a bounded Lipschitz domain, $[-1,1]^\infty$, $f \in L_2(D)$, and the diffusions $a$ satisfy the uniform ellipticity assumption and are affinely dependent with respect to $y$. The parametric variable $y$ may be deterministic or random. In the present paper, a central question to be studied is as follows. Assume that we have an approximation property that there is a sequence of finite element approximations with a certain error convergence rate in energy norm of the space $V:=H^1_0(D)$ for the nonparametric problem $- \operatorname{dv} \big(a(y_0)(x)\nabla u(y_0)(x)\big) = f(x)$ at every point $y_0 \in [-1,1]^\infty$. Then under what assumptions does this sequence induce a sequence of finite element approximations with the same error convergence rate for the parametric elliptic problem in the norm of the Bochner spaces $L_\infty([-1,1]^\infty,V)$ or $L_2([-1,1]^\infty,V)$? We solved this question by linear collective Taylor, collocation and Galerkin methods, based on Taylor expansions, Lagrange polynomial interpolations and Legendre polynomials expansions, respectively, on the parametric domain $[-1,1]^\infty$. Under very light conditions, we show that all these approximation methods give the same error convergence rate as that by the sequence of finite element approximations for the nonparametric elliptic problem. The parametric infinite-variate part completely disappears from the convergence rate and influences only the constant. Hence the curse of dimensionality is broken by linear methods.