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Probabilistic Meshless Methods for Partial Differential Equations and Bayesian Inverse Problems
(2016)
This paper develops a class of meshless methods that are well-suited to statistical inverse problems involving partial differential equations (PDEs). The methods discussed in this paper view the forcing term in the PDE as a random field that induces a probability distribution over the residual error of a symmetric collocation method. This construction enables the solution of challenging inverse problems while accounting, in a rigorous way, for the impact of the discretisation of the forward problem. In particular, this confers robustness to failure of meshless methods, with statistical inferences driven to be more conservative in the presence of significant solver error. In addition, (i) a principled learning-theoretic approach to minimise the impact of solver error is developed, and (ii) the challenging setting of inverse problems with a non-linear forward model is considered. The method is applied to parameter inference problems in which non-negligible solver error must be accounted for in order to draw valid statistical conclusions.
It is well understood that Bayesian decision theory and average case analysis are essentially identical. However, if one is interested in performing uncertainty quantification for a numerical task, it can be argued that the decision-theoretic framework is neither appropriate nor sufficient. To this end, we consider an alternative optimality criterion from Bayesian experimental design and study its implied optimal information in the numerical context. This information is demonstrated to differ, in general, from the information that would be used in an average-case-optimal numerical method. The explicit connection to Bayesian experimental design suggests several distinct regimes in which optimal probabilistic numerical methods can be developed.
With the advent of high-performance computing, Bayesian methods are becoming increasingly popular tools for the quantification of uncertainty throughout science and industry. Since these methods can impact the making of sometimes critical decisions in increasingly complicated contexts, the sensitivity of their posterior conclusions with respect to the underlying models and prior beliefs is a pressing question to which there currently exist positive and negative answers. We report new results suggesting that, although Bayesian methods are robust when the number of possible outcomes is finite or when only a finite number of marginals of the data-generating distribution are unknown, they could be generically brittle when applied to continuous systems (and their discretizations) with finite information on the data-generating distribution. If closeness is defined in terms of the total variation (TV) metric or the matching of a finite system of generalized moments, then (1) two practitioners who use arbitrarily close models and observe the same (possibly arbitrarily large amount of) data may reach opposite conclusions; and (2) any given prior and model can be slightly perturbed to achieve any desired posterior conclusion. The mechanism causing brittleness/robustness suggests that learning and robustness are antagonistic requirements, which raises the possibility of a missing stability condition when using Bayesian inference in a continuous world under finite information.
We analytically determine Jacobi fields and parallel transports and compute geodesic regression in Kendall’s shape space. Using the derived expressions,
we can fully leverage the geometry via Riemannian optimization and thereby reduce the computational expense by several orders of magnitude over common,
nonlinear constrained approaches. The methodology is demonstrated by performing a longitudinal statistical analysis of epidemiological shape data. As an example
application we have chosen 3D shapes of knee bones, reconstructed from image
data of the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI). Comparing subject groups with incident and developing osteoarthritis versus normal controls, we find clear differences in the temporal development of femur shapes. This paves the way for early prediction of incident knee osteoarthritis, using geometry data alone.
We consider the application of active subspaces to inform a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, thereby aggressively reducing the computational dimension of the sampling problem. We show that the original formulation, as proposed by Constantine, Kent, and Bui-Thanh (SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 38(5):A2779-A2805, 2016), possesses asymptotic bias. Using pseudo-marginal arguments, we develop an asymptotically unbiased variant. Our algorithm is applied to a synthetic multimodal target distribution as well as a Bayesian formulation of a parameter inference problem for a Lorenz-96 system.
Modes of a probability measure on an infinite-dimensional Banach space X are often defined by maximising the small-radius limit of the ratio of measures of norm balls. Helin and Burger weakened the definition of such modes by considering only balls with centres in proper subspaces of X, and posed the question of when this restricted notion coincides with the unrestricted one. We generalise these definitions to modes of arbitrary measures on topological vector spaces, defined by arbitrary bounded, convex, neighbourhoods of the origin. We show that a coincident limiting ratios condition is a necessary and sufficient condition for the equivalence of these two types of modes, and show that the coincident limiting ratios condition is satisfied in a wide range of topological vector spaces.