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 , 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}
}