Bayesian approach to inverse problems for functions with a variable-index Besov prior

Abstract

The Bayesian approach has been adopted to solve inverse problems that reconstruct a function from noisy observations. Prior measures play a key role in the Bayesian method. Hence, many probability measures have been proposed, among which total variation (TV) is a well-known prior measure that can preserve sharp edges. However, it has two drawbacks, the staircasing effect and a lack of the discretization-invariant property. The variable-index TV prior has been proposed and analyzed in the area of image analysis for the former, and the Besov prior has been employed recently for the latter. To overcome both issues together, in this paper, we present a variable-index Besov prior measure, which is a non-Gaussian measure. Some useful properties of this new prior measure have been proven for functions defined on a torus. We have also generalized Bayesian inverse theory in infinite dimensions for our new setting. Finally, this theory has been applied to integer- and fractional-order backward diffusion problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the Bayesian approach has been used for the fractional-order backward diffusion problem, which provides an opportunity to quantify its uncertainties.