High accuracy complex computer models, or simulators, require large resources
in time and memory to produce realistic results. Statistical emulators are
computationally cheap approximations of such simulators. They can be built to
replace simulators for various purposes, such as the propagation of
uncertainties from inputs to outputs or the calibration of some internal
parameters against observations. However, when the input space is of high
dimension, the construction of an emulator can become prohibitively expensive.
In this paper, we introduce a joint framework merging emulation with dimension
reduction in order to overcome this hurdle. The gradient-based kernel dimension
reduction technique is chosen due to its ability to drastically decrease
dimensionality with little loss in information. The Gaussian process emulation
technique is combined with this dimension reduction approach. Our proposed
approach provides an answer to the dimension reduction issue in emulation for a
wide range of simulation problems that cannot be tackled using existing
methods. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed framework is demonstrated
theoretically, and compared with other methods on an elliptic partial
differential equation (PDE) problem. We finally present a realistic application
to tsunami modeling. The uncertainties in the bathymetry (seafloor elevation)
are modeled as high-dimensional realizations of a spatial process using a
geostatistical approach. Our dimension-reduced emulation enables us to compute
the impact of these uncertainties on resulting possible tsunami wave heights
near-shore and on-shore. We observe a significant increase in the spread of
uncertainties in the tsunami heights due to the contribution of the bathymetry
uncertainties. These results highlight the need to include the effect of
uncertainties in the bathymetry in tsunami early warnings and risk assessments.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
