Absolute Continuity of Singular SPDEs and Bayesian Inference on Dynamical Systems
| dc.contributor.advisor | Mattingly, Jonathan C | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Mukherjee, Sayan | |
| dc.contributor.author | Su, Langxuan | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-06-08T18:22:08Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-06-08T18:22:08Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023 | |
| dc.department | Mathematics | |
| dc.description.abstract | We explore the interplay among probability, stochastic analysis, and dynamical systems through two lenses: (1) absolute continuity of singular stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs); (2) Bayesian inference on dynamical systems. In the first part, we prove that up to a certain singular regime, the law of the stochastic Burgers equation at a fixed time is absolutely continuous with respect to the corresponding stochastic heat equation with the nonlinearity removed. The results follow from an extension of the Girsanov Theorem to handle less spatially regular solutions while only proving absolute continuity at a fixed time. To deal with the singularity, we introduce a novel decomposition in the spirit of Da Prato-Debussche and Gaussian chaos decomposition in singular SPDEs, by separating out the noise into different levels of regularity, along with a number of renormalization techniques. The number of levels in this decomposition diverges to infinite as we move to the stochastic Burgers equation associated with the KPZ equation. This result illustrates the fundamental probabilistic structure of a class of singular SPDEs and a notion of ``ellipticity'' in the infinite-dimensional setting. In the second part, we establish connections between large deviations and a class of generalized Bayesian inference procedures on dynamical systems. We show that posterior consistency can be derived using a combination of classical large deviation techniques, such as Varadhan's lemma, conditional/quenched large deviations, annealed large deviations, and exponential approximations. We identified the divergence term as the Donsker-Varadhan relative entropy rate, also related to the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy in ergodic theory. As an application, we prove new quenched/annealed large deviation asymptotics and a new Bayesian posterior consistency result for a class of mixing stochastic processes. In the case of Markov processes, one can obtain explicit conditions for posterior consistency, when estimates for log-Sobolev constants are available, which makes our framework essentially a black box. We also recover state-of-the-art posterior consistency on classical dynamical systems with a simple proof. Our approach has the potential of proving posterior consistency for a wide range of Bayesian procedures in a unified way. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | ||
| dc.subject | Mathematics | |
| dc.subject | Bayesian posterior consistency | |
| dc.subject | Girsanov theorem | |
| dc.subject | large deviation | |
| dc.subject | singular SPDE | |
| dc.title | Absolute Continuity of Singular SPDEs and Bayesian Inference on Dynamical Systems | |
| dc.type | Dissertation |