Analysis of Hierarchical Ensemble Kalman Inversion

Abstract: We discuss properties of hierarchical Bayesian inversion through the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). Our focus will be primarily on deriving continuous-time limits for hierarchical inversion in the linear case. An important characteristic of the EnKF for inverse problems is that the updated particles are preserved by the linear span of the initial ensemble. By incorporating certain hierarchical approaches we show that we can break away from the induced subspace property. We further consider a number of variants of the EnKF such as covariance inflation and localization, where we derive their continuous-time limits. We verify these results with various numerical experiments through a linear elliptic partial differential equation.