Adaptive Tikhonov strategies for stochastic ensemble Kalman inversion

Ensemble Kalman inversion (EKI) is a derivative-free optimizer aimed at solving inverse problems, taking motivation from the celebrated ensemble Kalman filter. The purpose of this article is to consider the introduction of adaptive Tikhonov strategies for EKI. This work builds upon Tikhonov EKI (TEKI) which was proposed for a fixed regularization constant. By adaptively learning the regularization parameter, this procedure is known to improve the recovery of the underlying unknown. For the analysis, we consider a continuous-time setting where we extend known results such as well-posedness and convergence of various loss functions, but with the addition of noisy observations for the limiting stochastic differential equations (i.e. stochastic TEKI). Furthermore, we allow a time-varying noise and regularization covariance in our presented convergence result which mimic adaptive regularization schemes. In turn we present three adaptive regularization schemes, which are highlighted from both the deterministic and Bayesian approaches for inverse problems, which include bilevel optimization, the maximum a posteriori formulation and covariance learning. We numerically test these schemes and the theory on linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, where they outperform the non-adaptive TEKI and EKI. © 2022 IOP Publishing Ltd.