Convergence guarantees for coefficient reconstruction in PDEs from boundary measurements by variational and Newton-type methods via range invariance

Abstract

Abstract A key observation underlying this paper is the fact that the range invariance condition for convergence of regularization methods for nonlinear ill-posed operator equations—such as coefficient identification in partial differential equations (PDEs) from boundary observations—can often be achieved by extending the searched for parameter in the sense of allowing it to depend on additional variables. This clearly counteracts unique identifiability of the parameter, though. The second key idea of this paper is now to restore the original restricted dependency of the parameter by penalization. This is shown to lead to convergence of variational (Tikhonov type) and iterative (Newton-type) regularization methods. We concretize the abstract convergence analysis in a framework typical of parameter identification in PDEs in a reduced and an all-at-once setting. This is further illustrated by three examples of coefficient identification from boundary observations in elliptic and time-dependent PDEs.