Publications

Computationally efficient Bayesian inference for inverse problems

Marzouk, Youssef M.; Najm, H.N.; Rahn, Larry A.

Bayesian statistics provides a foundation for inference from noisy and incomplete data, a natural mechanism for regularization in the form of prior information, and a quantitative assessment of uncertainty in the inferred results. Inverse problems - representing indirect estimation of model parameters, inputs, or structural components - can be fruitfully cast in this framework. Complex and computationally intensive forward models arising in physical applications, however, can render a Bayesian approach prohibitive. This difficulty is compounded by high-dimensional model spaces, as when the unknown is a spatiotemporal field. We present new algorithmic developments for Bayesian inference in this context, showing strong connections with the forward propagation of uncertainty. In particular, we introduce a stochastic spectral formulation that dramatically accelerates the Bayesian solution of inverse problems via rapid evaluation of a surrogate posterior. We also explore dimensionality reduction for the inference of spatiotemporal fields, using truncated spectral representations of Gaussian process priors. These new approaches are demonstrated on scalar transport problems arising in contaminant source inversion and in the inference of inhomogeneous material or transport properties. We also present a Bayesian framework for parameter estimation in stochastic models, where intrinsic stochasticity may be intermingled with observational noise. Evaluation of a likelihood function may not be analytically tractable in these cases, and thus several alternative Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) schemes, operating on the product space of the observations and the parameters, are introduced.