Scalable Bayesian uncertainty quantification with data-driven priors for radio interferometric imaging

Abstract

Abstract Next-generation radio interferometers like the Square Kilometer Array have the potential to unlock scientific discoveries thanks to their unprecedented angular resolution and sensitivity. One key to unlocking their potential resides in handling the deluge and complexity of incoming data. This challenge requires building radio interferometric (RI) imaging methods that can cope with the massive data sizes and provide high-quality image reconstructions with uncertainty quantification (UQ). This work proposes a method coined QuantifAI to address UQ in RI imaging with data-driven (learned) priors for high-dimensional settings. Our model, rooted in the Bayesian framework, uses a physically motivated model for the likelihood. The model exploits a data-driven convex prior potential, which can encode complex information learned implicitly from simulations and guarantee the log-concavity of the posterior. We leverage probability concentration phenomena of high-dimensional log-concave posteriors to obtain information about the posterior, avoiding MCMC sampling techniques. We rely on convex optimisation methods to compute the MAP estimation, which is known to be faster and better scale with dimension than MCMC strategies. QuantifAI allows us to compute local credible intervals and perform hypothesis testing of structure on the reconstructed image. We propose a novel fast method to compute pixel-wise uncertainties at different scales, which uses 3 and 6 orders of magnitude less likelihood evaluations than other UQ methods like length of the credible intervals and Monte Carlo posterior sampling, respectively. We demonstrate our method by reconstructing RI images in a simulated setting and carrying out fast and scalable UQ, which we validate with MCMC sampling. Our method shows an improved image quality and more meaningful uncertainties than the benchmark method based on a sparsity-promoting prior. QuantifAI’s source code is available from https://github.com/astro-informatics/QuantifAI.