Stochastic convergence of regularized solutions for backward heat conduction problems

Abstract: In this paper, we study the stochastic convergence of regularized solutions for backward heat conduction problems. These problems are recognized as ill-posed due to the exponential decay of eigenvalues associated with the forward problems. We derive an error estimate for the least-squares regularized minimization problem within the framework of stochastic convergence. Our analysis reveals that the optimal error of the Tikhonov-type least-squares optimization problem depends on the noise level, the number of sensors, and the underlying ground truth. Moreover, we propose a self-adaptive algorithm to identify the optimal regularization parameter for the optimization problem without requiring knowledge of the noise level or any other prior information, which will be very practical in applications. We present numerical examples to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed method. These numerical results show that our method is efficient in solving backward heat conduction problems.