Convergence rates of adaptive methods, Besov spaces, and multilevel approximation

This paper concerns characterizations of approximation classes associated to adaptive finite element methods with isotropic h-refinements. It is known from the seminal work of Binev, Dahmen, DeVore and Petrushev that such classes are related to Besov spaces. The range of parameters for which the inverse embedding results hold is rather limited, and recently, Gaspoz and Morin have shown, among other things, that this limitation disappears if we replace Besov spaces by suitable approximation spaces associated to finite element approximation from uniformly refined triangulations. We call the latter spaces multievel approximation spaces, and argue that these spaces are placed naturally halfway between adaptive approximation classes and Besov spaces, in the sense that it is more natural to relate multilevel approximation spaces with either Besov spaces or adaptive approximation classes, than to go directly from adaptive approximation classes to Besov spaces. In particular, we prove embeddings of multilevel approximation spaces into adaptive approximation classes, complementing the inverse embedding theorems of Gaspoz and Morin. Furthermore, in the present paper, we initiate a theoretical study of adaptive approximation classes that are defined using a modified notion of error, the so-called total error, which is th