Adaptive wavelet methods for solving operator equations: An overview

In [Math. Comp, 70 (2001), 27-75] and [Found. Comput. Math., 2(3) (2002), 203-245], Cohen, Dahmen and DeVore introduced adaptive wavelet methods for solving operator equations. These papers meant a break-through in the field, because their adaptive methods were not only proven to converge, but also with a rate better than that of their non-adaptive counterparts in cases where the latter methods converge with a reduced rate due a lacking regularity of the solution. Until then, adaptive methods were usually assumed to converge via a saturation assumption. An exception was given by the work of Dörfler in [SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 33 (1996), 1106-1124], where an adaptive finite element method was proven to converge, with no rate though.
This work contains a complete analysis of the methods from the aforementioned two papers of Cohen, Dahmen and DeVore. Furthermore, we give an overview over the subsequent developments in the field of adaptive wavelet methods. This includes a precise analysis of the near-sparsity of an operator in wavelet coordinates needed to obtain optimal computational complexity; the avoidance of coarsening; quantitative improvements of the algorithms; their generalization to frames; and their application with tensor product wavelet bases which give dimension independent rates.