116,699 research outputs found
Iterative Updating of Model Error for Bayesian Inversion
In computational inverse problems, it is common that a detailed and accurate
forward model is approximated by a computationally less challenging substitute.
The model reduction may be necessary to meet constraints in computing time when
optimization algorithms are used to find a single estimate, or to speed up
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) calculations in the Bayesian framework. The use
of an approximate model introduces a discrepancy, or modeling error, that may
have a detrimental effect on the solution of the ill-posed inverse problem, or
it may severely distort the estimate of the posterior distribution. In the
Bayesian paradigm, the modeling error can be considered as a random variable,
and by using an estimate of the probability distribution of the unknown, one
may estimate the probability distribution of the modeling error and incorporate
it into the inversion. We introduce an algorithm which iterates this idea to
update the distribution of the model error, leading to a sequence of posterior
distributions that are demonstrated empirically to capture the underlying truth
with increasing accuracy. Since the algorithm is not based on rejections, it
requires only limited full model evaluations.
We show analytically that, in the linear Gaussian case, the algorithm
converges geometrically fast with respect to the number of iterations. For more
general models, we introduce particle approximations of the iteratively
generated sequence of distributions; we also prove that each element of the
sequence converges in the large particle limit. We show numerically that, as in
the linear case, rapid convergence occurs with respect to the number of
iterations. Additionally, we show through computed examples that point
estimates obtained from this iterative algorithm are superior to those obtained
by neglecting the model error.Comment: 39 pages, 9 figure
Learning the Structure for Structured Sparsity
Structured sparsity has recently emerged in statistics, machine learning and
signal processing as a promising paradigm for learning in high-dimensional
settings. All existing methods for learning under the assumption of structured
sparsity rely on prior knowledge on how to weight (or how to penalize)
individual subsets of variables during the subset selection process, which is
not available in general. Inferring group weights from data is a key open
research problem in structured sparsity.In this paper, we propose a Bayesian
approach to the problem of group weight learning. We model the group weights as
hyperparameters of heavy-tailed priors on groups of variables and derive an
approximate inference scheme to infer these hyperparameters. We empirically
show that we are able to recover the model hyperparameters when the data are
generated from the model, and we demonstrate the utility of learning weights in
synthetic and real denoising problems
- …