Uncertainty quantification for nonlinear difference equations with dependent random inputs via a stochastic Galerkin projection technique

•Quantify uncertainty for nonlinear difference models with dependent random inputs.•Previous contributions only deal with independent random inputs.•Galerkin projections directly onto linear spans of canonical polynomials.•Theoretical and numerical analysis of spectral convergence of the Galerkin projections. Discrete stochastic systems model discrete response data on some phenomenon with inherent uncertainty. The main goal of uncertainty quantification is to derive the probabilistic features of the stochastic system. This paper deals with theoretical and computational aspects of uncertainty quantification for nonlinear difference equations with dependent random inputs. When the random inputs are independent random variables, a generalized Polynomial Chaos (gPC) approach has been usually used to computationally quantify the uncertainty of stochastic systems. In the gPC technique, the stochastic Galerkin projections are done onto linear spans of orthogonal polynomials from the Askey–Wiener scheme or from Gram–Schmidt orthonormalization procedures. In this regard, recent results have established the algebraic or exponential convergence of these Galerkin projections to the solution process. In this paper, as the random inputs of the difference equation may be dependent, we perform Galerkin projections directly onto linear spans of canonical polynomials. The main contribution of this paper is to study the spectral convergence of these Galerkin projections for the solution process of general random difference equations. Spectral convergence is important to derive the main statistics of the response process at a cheap computational expense. In this regard, the numerical experiments bring to light the theoretical discussion of the paper.