Numerical study on hyper parameter settings for neural network approximation to partial differential equations

Approximate solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) obtained by neural networks are highly affected by hyper parameter settings. For instance, the model training strongly depends on loss function design, including the choice of weight factors for different terms in the loss function, and the sampling set related to numerical integration; other hyper parameters, like the network architecture and the optimizer settings, also impact the model performance. On the other hand, suitable hyper parameter settings are known to be different for different model problems and currently no universal rule for the choice of hyper parameters is known. In this paper, for second order elliptic model problems, various hyper parameter settings are tested numerically to provide a practical guide for efficient and accurate neural network approximation. While a full study of all possible hyper parameter settings is not possible, we focus on studying the formulation of the PDE loss as well as the incorporation of the boundary conditions, the choice of collocation points associated with numerical integration schemes, and various approaches for dealing with loss imbalances will be extensively studied on various model problems; in addition to various Poisson model problems, also a nonlinear and an eigenvalue problem are considered.