No Arabic abstract
We present a parametric deterministic formulation of Bayesian inverse problems with input parameter from infinite dimensional, separable Banach spaces. In this formulation, the forward problems are parametric, deterministic elliptic partial differential equations, and the inverse problem is to determine the unknown, parametric deterministic coefficients from noisy observations comprising linear functionals of the solution. We prove a generalized polynomial chaos representation of the posterior density with respect to the prior measure, given noisy observational data. We analyze the sparsity of the posterior density in terms of the summability of the input datas coefficient sequence. To this end, we estimate the fluctuations in the prior. We exhibit sufficient conditions on the prior model in order for approximations of the posterior density to converge at a given algebraic rate, in terms of the number $N$ of unknowns appearing in the parameteric representation of the prior measure. Similar sparsity and approximation results are also exhibited for the solution and covariance of the elliptic partial differential equation under the posterior. These results then form the basis for efficient uncertainty quantification, in the presence of data with noise.
Deterministic interpolation and quadrature methods are often unsuitable to address Bayesian inverse problems depending on computationally expensive forward mathematical models. While interpolation may give precise posterior approximations, deterministic quadrature is usually unable to efficiently investigate an informative and thus concentrated likelihood. This leads to a large number of required expensive evaluations of the mathematical model. To overcome these challenges, we formulate and test a multilevel adaptive sparse Leja algorithm. At each level, adaptive sparse grid interpolation and quadrature are used to approximate the posterior and perform all quadrature operations, respectively. Specifically, our algorithm uses coarse discretizations of the underlying mathematical model to investigate the parameter space and to identify areas of high posterior probability. Adaptive sparse grid algorithms are then used to place points in these areas, and ignore other areas of small posterior probability. The points are weighted Leja points. As the model discretization is coarse, the construction of the sparse grid is computationally efficient. On this sparse grid, the posterior measure can be approximated accurately with few expensive, fine model discretizations. The efficiency of the algorithm can be enhanced further by exploiting more than two discretization levels. We apply the proposed multilevel adaptive sparse Leja algorithm in numerical experiments involving elliptic inverse problems in 2D and 3D space, in which we compare it with Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling and a standard multilevel approximation.
This paper proposes a systematic mathematical analysis of both the direct and inverse acoustic scattering problem given the source in Radon measure space. For the direct problem, we investigate the well-posedness including the existence, the uniqueness, and the stability by introducing a special definition of the weak solution, i.e. emph{very} weak solution. For the inverse problem, we choose the Radon measure space instead of the popular $L^1$ space to build the sparse reconstruction, which can guarantee the existence of the reconstructed solution. The sparse reconstruction problem can be solved by the semismooth Newton method in the dual space. Numerical examples are included.
Inverse scattering problems have many important applications. In this paper, given limited aperture data, we propose a Bayesian method for the inverse acoustic scattering to reconstruct the shape of an obstacle. The inverse problem is formulated as a statistical model using the Bayes formula. The well-posedness is proved in the sense of the Hellinger metric. The extended sampling method is modified to provide the initial guess of the target location, which is critical to the fast convergence of the MCMC algorithm. An extensive numerical study is presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.
Bayesian methods are actively used for parameter identification and uncertainty quantification when solving nonlinear inverse problems with random noise. However, there are only few theoretical results justifying the Bayesian approach. Recent papers, see e.g. cite{Nickl2017,lu2017bernsteinvon} and references therein, illustrate the main difficulties and challenges in studying the properties of the posterior distribution in the nonparametric setup. This paper offers a new approach for study the frequentist properties of the nonparametric Bayes procedures. The idea of the approach is to relax the nonlinear structural equation by introducing an auxiliary functional parameter and replacing the structural equation with a penalty and by imposing a prior on the auxiliary parameter. For the such extended model, we state sharp bounds on posterior concentration and on the accuracy of the penalized MLE and on Gaussian approximation of the posterior, and a number of further results. All the bounds are given in terms of effective dimension, and we show that the proposed calming device does not significantly affect this value.
We present the Sequential Ensemble Transform (SET) method, an approach for generating approximate samples from a Bayesian posterior distribution. The method explores the posterior distribution by solving a sequence of discrete optimal transport problems to produce a series of transport plans which map prior samples to posterior samples. We prove that the sequence of Dirac mixture distributions produced by the SET method converges weakly to the true posterior as the sample size approaches infinity. Furthermore, our numerical results indicate that, when compared to standard Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, the SET approach is more robust to the choice of Markov mutation kernels and requires less computational efforts to reach a similar accuracy when used to explore complex posterior distributions. Finally, we describe adaptive schemes that allow to completely automate the use of the SET method.