# Week 7 Lecture 1: Finite Differences

This week we will begin discussing the concept of numerical differentiation. That is, we will be trying to numerically approximate the derivative(s) of a given function. We will look at this concept from two slightly different angles. One possibility is that we are given some function and a point and we want to compute the derivative of f at . That is, we want to find . If f is relatively simple, then we already know how to do this from calculus, so we will generally assume that f is either very complicated or that we do not have access to the formula. (For instance, we might be given a MATLAB function but not be able to read the code.) The other possibility is that we are given a set of data points , , ..., and we want to find out how fast the data points are changing at one of the points .
These two situations are not as different as they might sound, and it is easy to convert back and forth between them. If you are given a function , then you can simply plug in the numbers , , ..., to obtain all the necessary y-values and then forget about the function. Likewise, if you have a set of data, you can simply pretend that all of the y-values arose from some function , even if you don't know the formula.
Both approaches are useful, but for different reasons. From a theoretical point of view, it really only makes sense to talk about the derivative of a function. There is no good rigorous definition of a derivative on a discrete set of points. We will therefore always assume that we have a function when working by hand. However, in real world applications we almost never have access to the true formula that produced our data. Instead, we have a set of data points and it is either expensive or impossible to collect any more. When writing code, we will therefore almost always assume that we have a fixed set of x and y values, even if we really do know the function involved.

### Forward difference scheme

Remember from your calculus class that the definition of a derivative is
(1)
This presents a problem for us because computing a limit requires infinitely many points. To find exactly, it is not enough to know or or ; we need to know y-values infinitely close to . Of course, finding infinitely many points or points that are infinitely close together is not possible on a computer, so we will have to settle for some sort of approximation.
Equation (1) suggests a simple method of approximating the derivative. If is the limit of that difference quotient as becomes arbitrarilly small, perhaps we can choose a small but fixed value for and get a good approximation. That is, if we fix some small number then we should have
(2)
It should be obvious from the definition of a limit that this is a valid approach. If we choose too large a then we may get a bad approximation, but as we shrink we will necessarily get closer and closer to the true value of . Approximations of this form are called difference schemes, and this particular one is a forward difference scheme. The word "forward" refers to the fact that we are evaluating f at the point x that we care about and another point ahead of that point. If you were standing on the number line at x, then you would have to look forward to see .
A very important question to ask about any difference scheme is: "How quickly do we converge to the true value as we shrink ?" That is, if we choose some small then there will be some error between our approximation and the real . If we choose a that is ten times smaller, what will happen to our error? Will it also be ten times smaller? One hundred times smaller? Something else? We can analyze the error of all difference schemes in a systematic way using Taylor expansions. Remember that
For this equation to be an equality, we need infinitely many terms. Of course, the whole point of using a difference scheme was so that we could avoid doing something infinitely many times. Fortunately, when is small, or or will be much smaller. This means that, as long as is small enough, we can safely ignore the terms with higher powers because they are very close to zero. We will use the notation to indicate which terms we are ignoring. We have already encountered this notation before, when counting the number of instructions required to solve a linear system. The idea here is the same: represents a polynomial in where the largest term has a power of n. Notice that in the section on linear systems, the largest term was the one with the largest exponent because we were dealing with a variable N that was very large. In this case, the largest term is the one with the smallest exponent because is very small. This means that represents a polynomial where the smallest power of is n. We can therefore rewrite our Taylor expansion as
.
If we substitute this into the formula from (2), we get
.
Notice that when goes all the way to zero, everything but the first term goes away and we are just left with . This is what we were trying to approximate in the first place, which is a good sign. We say that the difference scheme is consistent, because in the limit as approaches zero it gives the correct value.
Also note that when is very small, raising it to a power makes it even smaller. In particular, and are much, much closer to zero than . This means that once is sufficiently small, we don't really need to worry about any of the higher powers of . We can therefore write (for sufficiently small ):
.
We call the second term in this equation the leading error term. It tells us approximately how far off our approximation is from the true value of . Of course, we don't actually know , so we don't know exactly what the error is. However, we do know that the error is proportional to raised to the first power. This means that if we shrink by a factor of ten, then the error will also shrink by a factor of ten. Likewise, if we shrink by a factor of one hundred, then the error will also shrink by a factor of 100. Because of this, we say that our difference scheme is first order. We call equation (2) a first order forward difference scheme for f'(x). It is important to remember that the phrase "first order" in this name refers to the power of in the error, not to the fact that we are approximating a first derivative.

### Backward difference scheme

In general, we like to keep positive in these equations, but the definition of a limit makes no such assumptions. It therefore makes sense to consider negative 's as well. Instead of allowing to change sign, we will make a small modification to our difference scheme and just replace every in equation (2) with . We obtain
. (3)
This is called a backward difference scheme because it involves the point x and a point behind x. (Again, if you imagine standing on the number line at x then you would have to look backwards to see the point .) We can analyze the error properties of this scheme just like we did with the forward difference scheme. To do so, we need to adjust our Taylor expansion by replacing every with a . We get
.
(Notice that the notation is already ignoring any constants in front of the term, so it does not matter if we say or . By convention, we always use a + sign.)
If we substitute this into formula (3), we obtain
.
Once again, if goes all the way to zero then every term disappears except for the , so this difference scheme is also consistent. If is very small, but not actually zero, then all the terms after the first two are so small that they don't really matter, so we can say that
.
The leading error term is therefore , which has a . We therefore know that our difference scheme is first order, and so we call it a first order backward difference scheme.

### Central difference scheme

The leading error terms for these forward and backward difference schemes have an interesting relationship. They are the same except for their sign. This means that if is positive then the forward difference scheme will overestimate by some amount and the backward difference scheme will underestimate by almost exactly the same amount. (The "almost" is important - we threw away higher order terms in those approximations because they were much smaller than the leading term, but those terms aren't exactly zero and they probably don't cancel.) This suggests a better difference scheme: What if we calculate the forward and backward difference approximations and then average them together? This gives us the following scheme:
(4)
This is called a central difference scheme because x is in between the other points that we use. From the above argument, we have reason to hope that this scheme has better error properties than either of the original schemes alone. We can check this using Taylor expansions, just as we did before. We get
.
Notice that when goes all the way to zero, we are just left with . This means that our new scheme is still consistent. The leading error term, however, is quite different in this scheme. In particular, it has a in it, so the error is second order or . This means that if we shrink by a factor of , the error of the forward and backward difference schemes from above only shrinks by a factor of , but the error for the central difference scheme shrinks by a factor of . We call this scheme a second order central difference scheme.

### Why use higher order schemes?

We are usually not just interested in finding at one point. Instead, we have a collection of many data points and we want to find at all of them so that we will have a good approximation to the function . In order to get a good approximation to , we need the error at each of these points to be small, which means we need to know y-values at points very close to all of our original data points. In practice, this means that if you want to make smaller, then you have to collect data at many more points. In particular, if you want to make ten times smaller, then you will typically need to collect ten times as much data. Data collection is often the most expensive part of an experiment, so it is important to use methods that don't require any more data than necessary. This is why we place such an emphasis on the order of the error term. It is not uncommon to encounter a situation like this: You plan to do an experiment that will require (at some point in the analysis) the approximation of a derivative. You collect some data for the pilot study and find that the error in this approximation is so large that you can't use the results. For the full study to be useful, you will need 100 times less error in your approximation. If you use a first order difference scheme, then you will need 100 times more data for the full study, which probably means that the full study will be around 100 times more expensive than the pilot. If you instead used a second order difference scheme, you would only need 10 times more data, which would bring down the cost by a factor of 10.
It is entirely possible to craft higher order difference schemes as well. For some applications this is entirely justified, but in practice it often turns out that second order schemes have a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. Each of our difference schemes in this lecture have required evaluating f twice for each derivative. It turns out that higher order schemes require evaluating f at more points. If you are using a set of pre-computed data points, then this is not really a problem, but if f is some complicated and slow function, then it is a good idea to avoid evaluating it any more than necessary. This means that more accurate schemes can often become substantially slower. For this reason, it is common to only use second order accurate schemes unless you have a compelling reason not to.

## Confirming Order

In the last lecture, we discussed several difference schemes for approximating the derivative . The forward and backward difference schemes that we discussed were first order accurate (i.e., the error was ), while the central difference scheme was second order accurate (i.e., the error was ).
Let's try to confirm this analysis with an example. In particular, let's use and try to calculate at . This is a simple enough problem that we know how to do it by hand. We have , and so the true value of is .
true_solution = cos(1)
true_solution =
0.540302305868140
Let's try to approximate this derivative with several different schemes. FIrst, let's use a forward scheme.

### Forward Scheme

We are trying to approximate the derivative of at . We know that the actual derivative is , so we can determine exactly how far off our approximations are.
We want to use the forward difference scheme
for various choices of . For example,
x0 = 1;
dx = 1;
forward_approx = (sin(x0 + dx) - sin(x0)) / dx
forward_approx =
0.067826442017785
The true solution is roughly 0.5403, so this is not a particularly good approximation. That is to be expected. Remember that all of our analysis in the last class relied on the idea that got very close to zero as the power n got larger. This is valid when is small, but not true at all when is large. This means that we have no reason to expect our approximation is any good when is large.
We could try the same thing with a smaller .
dx = 0.1;
forward_approx = (sin(x0 + dx) - sin(x0)) / dx
forward_approx =
0.497363752535389
This is certainly a better approximation than before, but it is still not particularly close. Let's continue this process with smaller and smaller 's. To make our analysis more convenient, we will collect all of our approximations in a vector named forward_approx.
forward_approx = zeros(5, 1);
for k = 1:5
dx = (1e-1)^(k-1);
forward_approx(k) = (sin(x0 + dx) - sin(x0)) / dx;
end
forward_approx
forward_approx = 5×1
0.067826442017785 0.497363752535389 0.536085981011869 0.539881480360327 0.540260231418621
At each step we reduced by a factor of 10. As you can see, the approximations get closer and closer to the correct answer. By the time we get to , we have the correct answer to at least four decimal places.
We are interested in how the error changes, so it will be more useful to look at the error between our approximations and the true solutions. It turns out that we will need to see more than four decimal places, so let's also use format long to make MATLAB display more decimals.
format long
err = abs(forward_approx - true_solution)
err = 5×1
0.472475863850355 0.042938553332751 0.004216324856271 0.000420825507813 0.000042074449519
Notice the pattern of the errors. At each step, the error gets divided by 10. We also know that we divided by 10 at each step, so this really is a first order method.

### Backward Scheme

Now we will do the same thing with the backward scheme
.
The code looks almost exactly the same as before.
backward_approx = zeros(5, 1);
dx = 1;
for k = 1:5
dx = (1e-1)^(k-1);
backward_approx(k) = (sin(x0) - sin(x0 - dx)) / dx;
end
backward_approx
backward_approx = 5×1
0.841470984807897 0.581440751804131 0.544500620737598 0.540722951275052 0.540344378516799
Again, these appear to be converging to the true solution () as gets smaller. We can also look at the error like before:
err = abs(backward_approx - true_solution)
err = 5×1
0.301168678939757 0.041138445935991 0.004198314869458 0.000420645406912 0.000042072648660
Once again, it looks like the error goes down by a factor of 10 at each step. (Actually, that does not appear to be true at the first step, where we reduced from 1 to . Remember, though, that our results are only really supposed to be valid for sufficiently small .) Once drops below about 0.1, it looks like every time we reduce by a factor of ten, the error also goes down by a factor of ten. This means that the backward difference scheme is also first order.

### Central Scheme

Now we will do the same thing with the central scheme
.
Once again, the code looks essentially the same.
central_approx = zeros(5, 1);
dx = 1;
for k = 1:5
dx = (1e-1)^(k-1);
central_approx(k) = (sin(x0 + dx) - sin(x0 - dx)) / (2*dx);
end
central_approx
central_approx = 5×1
0.454648713412841 0.539402252169760 0.540293300874733 0.540302215817689 0.540302304967710
As with the other two schemes, it seems clear that these are approaching the true solution , but we need to look at the error values to see how fast we are approaching the correct answer.
err = abs(central_approx - true_solution)
err = 5×1
0.085653592455299 0.000900053698380 0.000009004993406 0.000000090050450 0.000000000900430
This time the error values look substantially different. In particular, they are decreasing by a factor of 100 every time we reduce by a factor of 10. This means that the central difference scheme really is second order.

## How good is our approximation?

dx = (1e-1).^([1:5]-1);
loglog(dx, abs(forward_approx - true_solution), dx, abs(central_approx - true_solution), 'linewidth', 4)
Slope1 = (log10(abs(forward_approx(end) - true_solution(end))) - log10(abs(forward_approx(1) - true_solution(1))))/(log10(dx(end))-log10(dx(1)))
Slope1 =
1.012590296286065
Slope2 = (log10(abs(central_approx(end) - true_solution(end))) - log10(abs(central_approx(1) - true_solution(1))))/(log10(dx(end))-log10(dx(1)))
Slope2 =
1.994573952495742
Notice that the second slope is twice that of the first. Since we are using log-log scale, the accuracy of central approximation will be the square of the first. To convince you lets do the following:
(log10(abs(central_approx(end) - true_solution(end))) - log10(abs(central_approx(1) - true_solution(1))))/(log10(dx(end)^2)-log10(dx(1)^2))
ans =
0.997286976247871
Viola! After we square the timestep we see that this is the same value as forward differences. Actually this tells us for this particular case central differences is even more accurate than we theorized. We can also see this visually:
loglog((1e-1).^([1:5]-1), abs(forward_approx - true_solution), (1e-1).^([1:5]-1).^2, abs(central_approx - true_solution), 'linewidth', 4)
Notice that the slope of the squared discretization of the central difference is the same as the forward difference. We prove this rigorously in the theory lecture.

## Approximating over entire intervals

Now let's consider a very common situation: We have a list of x-values . We want to approximate at every point in this list. For example, suppose as before and we have the x-values 0, 0.1, 0.2, ..., 5.9, 6.
x = [0:0.1:6];
We will collect all of these approximations in a vector named deriv, so that the first enry of deriv corresponds to the derivative at the first x-value, etc.
deriv = zeros(size(x));
We can use any of our difference schemes for this problem. For no particular reason, let's use the central difference scheme for each point. We have to choose some value for as well, so let's start with .
dx = 1;
for k = 1:length(x)
deriv(k) = (sin(x(k) + dx) - sin(x(k) - dx)) / (2*dx);
end
We can see how good our approximation is in a couple of ways. To start, we could plot our approximation alongside the true solution .
plot(x, cos(x), x, deriv, 'r--', 'linewidth', 4)
or we can plot the error (i.e., the difference between our approximation and the true solution).
err = abs(deriv - cos(x));
plot(x, err, 'linewidth', 4)
Notice the scale on the y-axis here. Our approximation is off by roughly . If we decrease , we can make this more accurate. For example,
dx = 0.01;
deriv = zeros(size(x));
for k = 1:length(x)
deriv(k) = (sin(x(k) + dx) - sin(x(k) - dx)) / (2*dx);
end
err = abs(deriv - cos(x));
plot(x, err, 'linewidth', 4)
Again, note the scale on the y-axis. We reduced by a factor of 100 and the error fell by a factor of 100^2 = 10,000. This once again confirms that the central scheme is second order.

## Approximating Derivatives From Data

To see why we might care about higher order schemes, let's change our scenario slightly. Instead of knowing and a list of x-values, let's instead suppose that we only have a list of points: , , ..., . We assume that these y-values come from some function , so that , but we don't know the formula for this function. We will further assume that the x-values are evenly spaced and we will call the distance between two subsequent x-values . That is, . Everything we do below still works if the x-values are not evenly spaced, but it becomes much more tedious to write down the formulas.
For example, suppose we are given the data
x = 0:0.1:6;
y = sin(x);
Of course, you can tell from this code that the function is really , but we will pretend that we don't have access to this function. (Usually the y-values come from actual data, so you really don't know the function f.) We want to do the same thing as before: Approximate at each of the given x-values and store our approximations in the vector deriv.
n = length(x);
deriv = zeros(size(x));
Unfortunately, our old code will not work. The problem is that we used the function f many times in that code. Every time through the loop we used both f(x(k) + dx) and f(x(k) - dx). Since we don't know f, neither of these is possible. However, both of these are y-values of the function. If we choose our correctly, the hope is that we can use some of the y-values we already know rather than plugging anything into the function f.
In particular, since the x-values are each spaced 0.1 apart, let's choose .
dx = 0.1;
As an example, let's try to approximate at the 21st x-value:
x(21)
ans =
2
That is, we want to find . We don't actually have the function , but if we did we could write
deriv(21) = (f(x(21) + dx) - f(x(21) - dx)) / (2*dx)
Since , this translates to
deriv(21) = (f(x(21) + 0.1) - f(x(21) - 0.1)) / (2*0.1)
or
deriv(21) = (f(2.1) - f(1.9)) / (2*0.1)
We don't know the function f, but 2.1 and 1.9 are actually two of the x-values from our original data set. They are x(22) and x(20). This means that we already know and - they are just y(22) and y(20). This means that we can calculate the desired derivative with
deriv(21) = (y(22) - y(20)) / (2*dx);
A little experimentation will show that this works for almost every one of our x-values. (We will see why the "almost" is there in a moment.) If you want to approximate the derivative of f at x(k), you can use the fact that x(k) + dx = x(k + 1) and that x(k) - dx = x(k - 1), and so the corresponding y-values are f(x(k) + dx) = y(k + 1) and f(x(k) - dx) = y(k - 1). We can therefore try the code
deriv = zeros(size(x));
for k = 1:n
deriv(k) = (y(k + 1) - y(k - 1)) / (2*dx);
end
Unfortunately, if you try to run this code you will immediately encounter an error. The problem arises when we try to compute , which is deriv(1) in code, and when we try to compute , which is deriv(n) in code. Let's look at the first one. When (that is, when we are trying to find at the first x-value) we need y(2) and y(0). Unfortunately, y(0) does not exist - there is no such thing as the zeroth entry of a vector. This isn't just a problem with how we are indexing - in order to use a central scheme at we would need to know , but , which is not one of our original data points. This means that we don't know the corresponding y-value, so it is impossible to use this difference scheme. The only solution (without calculating more y-values) is to use a different kind of scheme. In particular, we can use a forward difference scheme. This translates to
.
In code, this is (f(x(1) + dx) - f(x(1))) / dx, which is the same as (f(x(2)) - f(x(1))) / dx, which is just (y(2) - y(1)) / dx. This means that we can write the forward difference scheme solely in terms of the original data.
Similarly, when (that is, when we are trying to find at the last x-value) we need y(n-1) and y(n+1). Unfortunately, y(n+1) does not exist either. The problem is that this is one after the last y-value in our data, so it is not one of our original data points. The only solution (without calculating more y-values) is to use a backward difference scheme. This translates to
.
In code, this is (f(x(n)) - f(x(n) - dx)) / dx, which is the same as (f(x(n)) - f(x(n - 1))) / dx, which is just (y(n) - y(n - 1)) / dx. This means that we can also write the backward difference scheme solely in terms of the original data.
We now have a full solution to our problem: We can use the central scheme (or any other scheme we want) for every point except the first and the last. For the first point, we need to use a forward difference scheme and for the last point we need to use a backward difference scheme. We can therefore write
deriv = zeros(size(x));
deriv(1) = (y(2) - y(1)) / dx;
for k = 2:n-1
deriv(k) = (y(k+1) - y(k-1)) / (2*dx);
end
deriv(n) = (y(n) - y(n-1)) / dx;
We can check our solution by plotting it alongside the actual derivative
plot(x, cos(x), 'k', x, deriv, 'r')