14,165 research outputs found
Surrogate Accelerated Bayesian Inversion for the Determination of the Thermal Diffusivity of a Material
Determination of the thermal properties of a material is an important task in
many scientific and engineering applications. How a material behaves when
subjected to high or fluctuating temperatures can be critical to the safety and
longevity of a system's essential components. The laser flash experiment is a
well-established technique for indirectly measuring the thermal diffusivity,
and hence the thermal conductivity, of a material. In previous works,
optimization schemes have been used to find estimates of the thermal
conductivity and other quantities of interest which best fit a given model to
experimental data. Adopting a Bayesian approach allows for prior beliefs about
uncertain model inputs to be conditioned on experimental data to determine a
posterior distribution, but probing this distribution using sampling techniques
such as Markov chain Monte Carlo methods can be incredibly computationally
intensive. This difficulty is especially true for forward models consisting of
time-dependent partial differential equations. We pose the problem of
determining the thermal conductivity of a material via the laser flash
experiment as a Bayesian inverse problem in which the laser intensity is also
treated as uncertain. We introduce a parametric surrogate model that takes the
form of a stochastic Galerkin finite element approximation, also known as a
generalized polynomial chaos expansion, and show how it can be used to sample
efficiently from the approximate posterior distribution. This approach gives
access not only to the sought-after estimate of the thermal conductivity but
also important information about its relationship to the laser intensity, and
information for uncertainty quantification. We also investigate the effects of
the spatial profile of the laser on the estimated posterior distribution for
the thermal conductivity
B-spline techniques for volatility modeling
This paper is devoted to the application of B-splines to volatility modeling,
specifically the calibration of the leverage function in stochastic local
volatility models and the parameterization of an arbitrage-free implied
volatility surface calibrated to sparse option data. We use an extension of
classical B-splines obtained by including basis functions with infinite
support. We first come back to the application of shape-constrained B-splines
to the estimation of conditional expectations, not merely from a scatter plot
but also from the given marginal distributions. An application is the Monte
Carlo calibration of stochastic local volatility models by Markov projection.
Then we present a new technique for the calibration of an implied volatility
surface to sparse option data. We use a B-spline parameterization of the
Radon-Nikodym derivative of the underlying's risk-neutral probability density
with respect to a roughly calibrated base model. We show that this method
provides smooth arbitrage-free implied volatility surfaces. Finally, we sketch
a Galerkin method with B-spline finite elements to the solution of the partial
differential equation satisfied by the Radon-Nikodym derivative.Comment: 25 page
Probabilistic modeling of flood characterizations with parametric and minimum information pair-copula model
This paper highlights the usefulness of the minimum information and parametric pair-copula construction (PCC) to model the joint distribution of flood event properties. Both of these models outperform other standard multivariate copula in modeling multivariate flood data that exhibiting complex patterns of dependence, particularly in the tails. In particular, the minimum information pair-copula model shows greater flexibility and produces better approximation of the joint probability density and corresponding measures have capability for effective hazard assessments. The study demonstrates that any multivariate density can be approximated to any degree of desired precision using minimum information pair-copula model and can be practically used for probabilistic flood hazard assessment
Efficient estimation of parameters in marginals in semiparametric multivariate models
Recent literature on semiparametric copula models focused on the situation when the marginals are specified nonparametrically and the copula function is given a parametric form. For example, this setup is used in Chen, Fan and Tsyrennikov (2006) [Efficient Estimation of Semiparametric Multivariate Copula Models, JASA] who focus on efficient estimation of copula parameters. We consider a reverse situation when the marginals are specified parametrically and the copula function is modelled nonparametrically. This setting is no less relevant in applications. We use the method of sieve for efficient estimation of parameters in marginals, derive its asymptotic distribution and show that the estimator is semiparametrically efficient. Simulations suggest that the sieve MLE can be up to 40% more efficient relative to QMLE depending on the strength of dependence between the marginals. An application using insurance company loss and expense data demonstrates empirical relevance of this setting.
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