Solutions to inverse problems that are ill-conditioned or ill-posed may have
significant intrinsic uncertainty. Unfortunately, analysing and quantifying
this uncertainty is very challenging, particularly in high-dimensional
problems. As a result, while most modern mathematical imaging methods produce
impressive point estimation results, they are generally unable to quantify the
uncertainty in the solutions delivered. This paper presents a new general
methodology for approximating Bayesian high-posterior-density credibility
regions in inverse problems that are convex and potentially very
high-dimensional. The approximations are derived by using recent concentration
of measure results related to information theory for log-concave random
vectors. A remarkable property of the approximations is that they can be
computed very efficiently, even in large-scale problems, by using standard
convex optimisation techniques. In particular, they are available as a
by-product in problems solved by maximum-a-posteriori estimation. The
approximations also have favourable theoretical properties, namely they
outer-bound the true high-posterior-density credibility regions, and they are
stable with respect to model dimension. The proposed methodology is illustrated
on two high-dimensional imaging inverse problems related to tomographic
reconstruction and sparse deconvolution, where the approximations are used to
perform Bayesian hypothesis tests and explore the uncertainty about the
solutions, and where proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used as
benchmark to compute exact credible regions and measure the approximation
error
