Bridging Scales in Chemotaxis: Scale-Uniform Forward Stability for Run-and-Tumble Kernel Estimation

Abstract

Chemotactic motion is described by run-and-tumble kinetic models at microscopic scales and by Keller--Segel equations at macroscopic scales. We develop variational loss functionals for estimating the two components $T_0(x)$ and $T_1(x)$ of a turning kernel $T_{\epsilon }=T_0+\epsilon T_1$, where $T_0$ determines the leading-order turning rate and diffusion, while $T_1$ governs the macroscopic chemotactic drift. Under suitable regularity and data-informativeness assumptions, we establish conditional scale-uniform forward-stability estimates showing that a small loss leads to a small discrepancy between the forward solutions generated by the true and estimated kernels across the kinetic and diffusive regimes. Combined with sparse inversion, the method accurately recovers smooth, nonsmooth, and strongly heterogeneous kernels and remains robust under measurement noise.

arXiv commentSubmitted to Inverse Problems