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Nonparametric Prior Learning in Differential Equation Modeling

Statistics Theory 2026-02-09 v2 Statistics Theory

Abstract

This paper addresses Bayesian inference related to partial differential equations (PDEs), particularly nonparametric regression constrained by PDEs. To effectively encode prior information, we propose a novel framework that learns a prediction function of the prior distribution from historical training datasets. We introduce hyper-prior and hyper-posterior distributions and derive a generalization error estimate, which accommodates data-dependent priors by extending the concept of differential privacy. Some mild conditions are given to validate the error estimate, where various typical PDEs such as diffusion and Darcy flow equations can be integrated. We thus formulate an infinite-dimensional optimization problem to obtain the point estimate of the hyper-posterior. Numerical examples demonstrate the performance of our proposed method in learning the prediction function of priors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.12436,
  title  = {Nonparametric Prior Learning in Differential Equation Modeling},
  author = {Junxiong Jia and Deyu Meng and Zongben Xu and Fang Yao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.12436},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

99 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:55:08.352Z