Approximation of Inverse Problems

Prof. Andrew Stuart ( University of Warwick )

Inverse problems are often ill-posed, with solutions that depend sensitively on data. Regularization of some form is often used to counteract this. I will describe an approach to regularization, based on a Bayesian formulation of the problem, which leads to a notion of well-posedness for inverse problems, at the level of probability measures. The stability which results from this well-posedness may be used as the basis for understanding approximation of inverse problems in finite dimensional spaces. I will describe a theory which carries out this program. The ideas will be illustrated with the classical inverse problem for the heat equation, and then applied to so more complicated inverse problems arising in data assimilation, such as determining the initial condition for the Navier-Stokes equation from observations.