English

Semi-parametric Bernstein-von Mises Theorem in a Parabolic PDE Problem

Statistics Theory 2026-02-03 v1 Statistics Theory

Abstract

We consider the heat equation with absorption in a bounded domain of Rd\mathbb{R}^d, where both the scalar diffusivity and the absorption function are unknown. We investigate a Bayesian approach for recovering the diffusivity from a noisy observation of the solution to the PDE over the domain. Given a Gaussian process prior on the absorption function, we derive a Bernstein-von Mises theorem for the marginal posterior distribution of the diffusivity under assumptions on the prior and on smoothness properties of the absorption.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.00889,
  title  = {Semi-parametric Bernstein-von Mises Theorem in a Parabolic PDE Problem},
  author = {Adel Magra and Frank van der Meulen and Aad van der Vaart},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.00889},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:29:41.920Z