Consistency of the Bayes method for the inverse scattering problem

Abstract

In this work, we consider the inverse scattering problem of determining an unknown refractive index from the far-field measurements using the nonparametric Bayesian approach. We use a collection of large ‘samples’, which are noisy discrete measurements taking from the scattering amplitude. We will study the frequentist property of the posterior distribution as the sample size tends to infinity. Our aim is to establish the consistency of the posterior distribution with an explicit contraction rate in terms of the sample size. We will consider two different priors on the space of parameters. The proof relies on the stability estimates of the forward and inverse problems. Due to the ill-posedness of the inverse scattering problem, the contraction rate is of a logarithmic type. We also show that such contraction rate is optimal in the statistical minimax sense.