Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling for inverse problems

Inverse problems with spatiotemporal observations are ubiquitous in scientific studies and engineering applications. In these spatiotemporal inverse problems, observed multivariate time series are used to infer parameters of physical or biological interests. Traditional solutions for these problems often ignore the spatial or temporal correlations in the data (static model), or simply model the data summarized over time (time-averaged model). In either case, the data information that contains the spatiotemporal interactions is not fully utilized for parameter learning, which leads to insufficient modeling in these problems. In this paper, we apply Bayesian models based on spatiotemporal Gaussian processess (STGP) to inverse problems with spatiotemporal data and show that the spatial and temporal information provides more effective parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification (UQ). We demonstrate the merit of Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling for inverse problems compared with traditional static and time-averaged approaches using a time-dependent advection–diffusion partial different equation (PDE) and three chaotic ordinary differential equations (ODE). We also provide theoretic justification for the superiority of spatiotemporal modeling to fit the trajectories even if it appears cumbersome (e.g. for chaotic dynamics).