Uncertainty quantification for Wavefield Reconstruction Inversion

In this work, we propose a method to quantify the uncertainty of wavefield reconstruction inversion under the framework of Bayesian inference. Unlike the conventional method using the wave equation as the forward mapping, we involve the wave equation misfit in the posterior distribution and propose a new posterior distribution. The negative log-likelihood of the new distribution is less oscillatory than that of the conventional posterior distribution, and its Gauss-Newton Hessian is a diagonal matrix that can be generated without any additional computational cost. We use the diagonal Gauss-Newton Hessian to derive an approximate Gaussian distribution at the maximum likelihood point to quantify the uncertainty. This method makes the uncertainty quantification for WRI computationally tractable and is able to provide reasonable uncertainty analysis based on our numerical results.

https://slim.gatech.edu/Publications/Public/Conferences/EAGE/2015/fang20...