Polynomial Chaos Acceleration for the Bayesian Inference of Random Fields with Gaussian Priors and Uncertain Covariance Hyper-Parameters

Abstract

We address model dimensionality reduction in the Bayesian inference of Gaussian fields, considering prior covariance function with unknown hyper-parameters. The Karhunen-Loeve (KL) expansion of a prior Gaussian process is traditionally derived assuming fixed covariance function with pre-assigned hyperparameter values. Thus, the modes strengths of the Karhunen-Loeve expansion inferred using available observations, as well as the resulting inferred process, dependent on the pre-assigned values for the covariance hyper-parameters. Here, we seek to infer the process and its the covariance hyper-parameters in a single Bayesian inference. To this end, the uncertainty in the hyper-parameters is treated by means of a coordinate transformation, leading to a KL-type expansion on a fixed reference basis of spatial modes, but with random coordinates conditioned on the hyper-parameters. A Polynomial Chaos (PC) expansion of the model prediction is also introduced to accelerate the Bayesian inference and the sampling of the posterior distribution with MCMC method. The PC expansion of the model prediction also rely on a coordinates transformation, enabling us to avoid expanding the dependence of the prediction with respect to the covariance hyper-parameters. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method on a transient diffusion equation by inferring spatially-varying log-diffusivity fields from noisy data.