Thursday, October 15, 2020

UQSay #16


The sixteenth UQSay seminar on Uncertainty Quantification and related topics, organized by L2S, MSSMAT, LMT and EDF R&D, will take place online on Thursday afternoon, October 22, 2020.

14h–15h — Nicolas Bousquet (EDF R&D)


Well-posed stochastic inversion in uncertainty quantification, with links with sensitivity analysis

Stochastic inversion problems are typically encountered when it is wanted to quantify the uncertainty affecting the inputs of computer models. They consist in estimating input distributions from noisy, observable outputs, and such problems are increasingly examined in Bayesian contexts where the targeted inputs are affected by a mixture of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. While they are characterized by identifiability conditions, well-posedness constraints of "signal to noise" have to be took into account within the definition of the model, prior to inference. In addition to numeric conditioning notions and regularization techniques used in inverse problems, we propose and investigate an interpretation of well-posedness, in the context of parametric uncertainty quantification and global sensitivity analysis, based on the degradation of Fisher information. It offers an explicitation of such prior constraints considering linear or linearizable operators, this linearization being either local (based on differentiability) or variational. Simulated experiments indicate that, when injected into the modeling process, these constraints can limit the influence of measurement or process noise on the estimation of the input distribution, and let hope for future extensions in a full non-linear framework, for example through the use of linear Gaussian mixtures.​

Organizing committee: Julien Bect (L2S), Emmanuel Vazquez (L2S), Didier Clouteau (MSSMAT), Filippo Gatti (MSSMAT), Fernando Lopez Caballero (MSSMAT), Amélie Fau (LMT), Bertrand Iooss (EDF R&D).

Practical details: the seminar will be held online using Microsoft Teams.

If you want to attend this seminar (or any of the forthcoming online UQSay seminars), and if you do not already have access to the UQSay group on Teams, simply send an email and you will be invited. Please specify which email address the invitation must be sent to (this has to be the address associated with your Teams account).

You will find the link to the seminar on the "General" UQSay channel on Teams, approximately 15 minutes before the beginning.

The technical side of things: you can use Teams either directly from you web browser or using the "fat client", which is available for most platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Android & iOS). We strongly recommend the latter option whenever possible. Please give it a try before the seminar to anticipate potential problems.