A new regularization approach for numerical differentiation

Abstract

It is well known that the problem of numerical differentiation is an ill-posed problem and one requires regularization methods to approximate the solution. The commonly practiced regularization methods are (external) parameter-based like Tikhonov regularization, which has certain inherent difficulties associated with them. In such scenarios, iterative regularization methods serve as an attractive alternative. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative regularization method where the minimizing functional does not contain the noisy data directly, but rather a smoothed or integrated version of it. The advantage, in addition to circumventing the use of noisy data directly, is that the sequence of functions constructed during the descent process tends to avoid overfitting, and hence, does not corrupt the recovery significantly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method we compare the numerical results obtained from our method with the numerical results obtained from certain standard regularization methods such as Tikhonov regularization, Total-variation, etc.