Bias-corrected regularized solution to inverse ill-posed models

Abstract

A regularized solution is well-known to be biased. Although the biases of the estimated parameters can only be computed with the true values of parameters, we attempt to improve the regularized solution by using the regularized solution itself to replace the true (unknown) parameters for estimating the biases and then removing the computed biases from the regularized solution. We first analyze the theoretical relationship between the regularized solutions with and without the bias correction, derive the analytical conditions under which a bias-corrected regularized solution performs better than the ordinary regularized solution in terms of mean squared errors (MSE) and design the corresponding method to partially correct the biases. We then present two numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of our partially bias-corrected regularization method. The first example is mathematical with a Fredholm integral equation of the first kind. The simulated results show that the partially bias-corrected regularized solution can improve the MSE of the ordinary regularized function by 11%. In the second example, we recover gravity anomalies from simulated gravity gradient observations. In this case, our method produces the mean MSE of 3.71 mGal for the resolved mean gravity anomalies, which is better than that from the regularized solution without bias correction by 5%. The method is also shown to successfully reduce the absolute maximum bias from 13.6 to 6.8 mGal.