PARALLEL ADAPTIVE MULTILEVEL SAMPLING ALGORITHMS FOR THE BAYESIAN ANALYSIS OF MATHEMATICAL MODELS

Abstract

In recent years, Bayesian model updating techniques based on measured data have been applied to many engineering and applied science problems. At the same time, parallel computational platforms are becoming increasingly more powerful and are being used more frequently by the engineering and scientific communities. Bayesian techniques usually require the evaluation of multi-dimensional integrals related to the posterior probability density function (PDF) of uncertain model parameters. The fact that such integrals cannot be computed analytically motivates the research of stochastic simulation methods for sampling posterior PDFs. One such algorithm is the adaptive multilevel stochastic simulation algorithm (AMSSA). In this paper we discuss the parallelization of AMSSA, formulating the necessary load balancing step as a binary integer programming problem. We present a variety of results showing the effectiveness of load balancing on the overall performance of AMSSA in a parallel computational environment.