Quasi-Monte Carlo and Multilevel Monte Carlo Methods for Computing Posterior Expectations in Elliptic Inverse Problems

Abstract: We are interested in computing the expectation of a functional of a PDE solution under a Bayesian posterior distribution. Using Bayes' rule, we reduce the problem to estimating the ratio of two related prior expectations. For a model elliptic problem, we provide a full convergence and complexity analysis of the ratio estimator in the case where Monte Carlo, quasi-Monte Carlo or multilevel Monte Carlo methods are used as estimators for the two prior expectations. We show that the computational complexity of the ratio estimator to achieve a given accuracy is the same as the corresponding complexity of the individual estimators for the numerator and the denominator. We {also include numerical simulations, in the context of the model elliptic problem, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.