Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2009
For a class of anisotropic integrodifferential operators ${\cal B}$ arising as semigroup generators of Markov processes, we present a sparse tensor product wavelet compression scheme for the Galerkin finite element discretization of the corresponding integrodifferential equations ${\cal B}$ u = f on [0,1]n with possibly large n. Under certain conditions on ${\cal B}$ , the scheme is of essentially optimal and dimension independent complexity $\mathcal{O}$ (h -1| log h |2(n-1)) without corrupting the convergence or smoothness requirements of the original sparse tensor finite element scheme. If the conditions on ${\cal B}$ are not satisfied, thecomplexity can be bounded by $\mathcal{O}$ (h -(1+ε)), whereε $\ll 1$ tends to zero with increasing number of the wavelets' vanishing moments. Here h denotes the width of the corresponding finite element mesh. The operators under consideration are assumed to be of non-negative (anisotropic) order and admit a non-standard kernel κ $(\cdot,\cdot)$ that can be singular on all secondary diagonals. Practical examples of such operators from Mathematical Finance are given and some numerical results are presented.