Behavior of the entropy numbers of classes of multivariate functions with mixed smoothness is studied here. This problem has a long history and some fundamental problems in the area are still open. The main goal of this paper is to develop a new method of proving the upper bounds for the entropy numbers. This method is based on recent developments of nonlinear approximation, in particular, on greedy approximation. This method consists of the following two steps strategy. At the first step we obtain bounds of the best m-term approximations with respect to a dictionary. At the second step we use general inequalities relating the entropy numbers to the best m-term approximations. For the lower bounds we use the volume estimates method, which is a well known powerful method for proving the lower bounds for the entropy numbers. It was used in a number of previous papers.
We are interested in approximation of a multivariate function $f(x_1,\dots,x_d)$ by linear combinations of products $u^1(x_1)\cdots u^d(x_d)$ of univariate functions $u^i(x_i)$, $i=1,\dots,d$. In the case $d=2$ it is a classical problem of bilinear approximation. In the case of approximation in the $L_2$ space the bilinear approximation problem is closely related to the problem of singular value decomposition (also called Schmidt expansion) of the corresponding integral operator with the kernel $f(x_1,x_2)$. There are known results on the rate of decay of errors of best bilinear approximation in $L_p$ under different smoothness assumptions on $f$. The problem of multilinear approximation (nonlinear tensor product approximation) in the case $d\ge 3$ is more difficult and much less studied than the bilinear approximation problem. We will present results on best multilinear approximation in $L_p$ under mixed smoothness assumption on $f$.