These notes are designed with the aim of providing a clear and concise
introduction to the subjects of Inverse Problems and Data Assimilation, and
their inter-relations, together with citations to some relevant literature in
this area. The first half of the notes is dedicated to studying the Bayesian
framework for inverse problems. Techniques such as importance sampling and
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are introduced; these methods have the
desirable property that in the limit of an infinite number of samples they
reproduce the full posterior distribution. Since it is often computationally
intensive to implement these methods, especially in high dimensional problems,
approximate techniques such as approximating the posterior by a Dirac or a
Gaussian distribution are discussed. The second half of the notes cover data
assimilation. This refers to a particular class of inverse problems in which
the unknown parameter is the initial condition of a dynamical system, and in
the stochastic dynamics case the subsequent states of the system, and the data
comprises partial and noisy observations of that (possibly stochastic)
dynamical system. We will also demonstrate that methods developed in data
assimilation may be employed to study generic inverse problems, by introducing
an artificial time to generate a sequence of probability measures interpolating
from the prior to the posterior