On the Bernstein-Von Mises Theorem for High Dimensional Nonlinear Bayesian Inverse Problems

Abstract: We prove a Bernstein-von Mises theorem for a general class of high dimensional nonlinear Bayesian inverse problems in the vanishing noise limit. We propose a sufficient condition on the growth rate of the number of unknown parameters under which the posterior distribution is asymptotically normal. This growth condition is expressed explicitly in terms of the model dimension, the degree of ill-posedness of the inverse problem and the noise parameter. The theoretical results are applied to a Bayesian estimation of the medium parameter in an elliptic problem.