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

Abstract

We consider the heat equation with absorption in a bounded domain of ${\mathbb{R}}^d$, 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.