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Multilevel Monte Carlo methods for Bayesian inference

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

For half a century computational scientists have been numerically simulating complex systems. Uncertainty is recently becoming a requisite consideration in complex applications which have been classically treated deterministically. This has led to an increasing interest in recent years in uncertainty quantification (UQ). Another recent trend is the explosion of available data. Bayesian inference provides a principled and well-defined approach to the integration of data into an a priori known distribution. The posterior distribution, however, is known only point-wise (possibly with an intractable likelihood) and up to a normalizing constant. Monte Carlo methods have been designed to sample such distributions, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers. Recently, the multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) framework has been extended to some of these cases, so that numerical approximation error can be optimally balanced with statistical sampling error, and ultimately the Bayesian inverse problem can be solved for the same asymptotic cost as solving the deterministic forward problem. This talk will concern the recent development of various MLMC algorithms for Bayesian inference problems.

Mathematics; Probability theory and stochastic processes; Numerical analysis; Industrial mathematics / modelling and simulation

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

2018-04-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/65247

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/