Iterative data-driven construction of surrogates for an efficient Bayesian identification of oil spill source parameters from image contours

Identifying the source of an oil spill is an essential step in environmental forensics. The Bayesian approach allows to estimate the source parameters of an oil spill from available observations. Sampling the posterior distribution, however, can be computationally prohibitive unless the forward model is replaced by an inexpensive surrogate. Yet the construction of globally accurate surrogates can be challenging when the forward model exhibits strong nonlinear variations. We present an iterative data-driven algorithm for the construction of polynomial chaos surrogates whose accuracy is localized in regions of high posterior probability. Two synthetic oil spill experiments, in which the construction of prior-based surrogates is not feasible, are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm in estimating five source parameters. The algorithm successfully provided a good approximation of the posterior distribution and accelerated the estimation of the oil spill source parameters and their uncertainties by an order of 100 folds.