Claudia Schillings, Freie Universität Berlin
Approaches to decision making and learning mainly rely on optimization techniques to achieve “best” values for parameters and decision variables. In most practical settings, however, the optimization takes place in the presence of uncertainty about model correctness, data relevance, and numerous other factors that influence the resulting solutions. For complex processes modeled by nonlinear ordinary and partial differential equations, the incorporation of these uncertainties typically results in high or even infinite dimensional problems in terms of the uncertain parameters as well as the optimization variables, which in many cases are not solvable with current state of the art methods. One promising potential remedy to this issue lies in the approximation of the forward problems using novel techniques arising in uncertainty quantification and machine learning. We propose in this talk a general framework for machine learning based optimization under uncertainty and inverse problems. Our approach replaces the complex forward model by a surrogate, e.g. a neural network, which is learned simultaneously in a one-shot sense when estimating the unknown parameters from data or solving the optimal control problem. By establishing a link to the Bayesian approach, an algorithmic framework is developed which ensures the feasibility of the parameter estimate / control w.r. to the forward model.
