Bayesian inference is used extensively to infer and to quantify the uncertainty in a field of interest from a measurement of a related field when the two are linked by a physical model. Despite its many applications, Bayesian inference faces challenges when inferring fields that have discrete representations of large dimension, and or have prior distributions that are difficult to represent mathematically. In this manuscript we consider the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in addressing these challenges. A GAN is a type of deep neural network equipped with the ability to learn the distribution implied by multiple samples of a given field. Once trained on these samples, the generator component of a GAN maps the iid components of a low-dimensional latent vector to an approximation of the distribution of the field of interest. In this work we demonstrate how this approximate distribution may be used as a prior in a Bayesian update, and how it addresses the challenges associated with characterizing complex prior distributions and the large dimension of the inferred field. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach by applying it to the problem of inferring and quantifying uncertainty in the initial temperature field in a heat conduction problem from a noisy measurement of the temperature at later time.
A greedy algorithm for the construction of a reduced model with reduction in both parameter and state is developed for an efficient solution of statistical inverse problems governed by partial differential equations with distributed parameters. Large-scale models are too costly to evaluate repeatedly, as is required in the statistical setting. Furthermore, these models often have high-dimensional parametric input spaces, which compounds the difficulty of effectively exploring the uncertainty space. We simultaneously address both challenges by constructing a projection-based reduced model that accepts low-dimensional parameter inputs and whose model evaluations are inexpensive. The associated parameter and state bases are obtained through a greedy procedure that targets the governing equations, model outputs, and prior information. The methodology and results are presented for groundwater inverse problems in one and two dimensions. The construction of suitable preconditioners for the solution of linear systems by iterative methods continues to receive a lot of interest. Traditionally, preconditioners are designed to accelerate convergence of iterative methods to the solution of the linear system. However, when truncated iterative methods are used as regularized solvers of ill-posed problems, the rate of convergence is seldom an issue, and traditional preconditioners are of little use. Here, we present a new approach to the design of preconditioners for ill-posed linear systems, suitable when statistical information about the desired solution or a collection of typical solutions is available. The preconditioners are constructed from the covariance matrix of the solution viewed as a random variable. Since the construction is based on available prior information, these preconditioners are called priorconditioners. A statistical truncation index selection is also presented. Computed examples illustrate how effective such priorconditioners can be. In this paper, we consider the impedance tomography problem of estimating the conductivity distribution within the body from static current voltage measurements on the body's surface. We present a new method of implementing prior information of the conductivities in the optimization algorithm. The method is based on the approximation of the prior covariance matrix by simulated samples of feasible conductivities. The reduction of the dimensionality of the optimization problem is performed by principal component analysis (PCA). We consider a Bayesian approach to nonlinear inverse problems in which the unknown quantity is a spatial or temporal field, endowed with a hierarchical Gaussian process prior. Computational challenges in this construction arise from the need for repeated evaluations of the forward model (e.g., in the context of Markov chain Monte Carlo) and are compounded by high dimensionality of the posterior. We address these challenges by introducing truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions, based on the prior distribution, to efficiently parameterize the unknown field and to specify a stochastic forward problem whose solution captures that of the deterministic forward model over the support of the prior. We seek a solution of this problem using Galerkin projection on a polynomial chaos basis, and use the solution to construct a reduced-dimensionality surrogate posterior density that is inexpensive to evaluate. We demonstrate the formulation on a transient diffusion equation with prescribed source terms, inferring the spatially-varying diffusivity of the medium from limited and noisy data.