arXiv subjects

Clément Gauchy

Publications and source records attributed to Clément Gauchy.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Multi-output Gaussian process prediction of physical fields under linear equality constraints

We address the simultaneous prediction of multiple high-dimensional physical fields governed by linear equality constraints, a setting that arises in many real-world applications in physics machine learning. Gaussian process (GP) regression is a widely used surrogate modeling approach due to its effectiveness in small-sample regimes and its ability to provide uncertainty quantification. However, applying GP models in this setting raises two major challenges: the high dimensionality of the discretized output fields and the enforcement of the physical constraint in predictions. For the latter, a common strategy consists in deducing one output from the others via the constraint relation. Through a benchmark, we show that this deductive approach is sensitive to the arbitrary choice of which output to deduce, affecting both predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification. Consequently, there is a need for an approach that treats all fields symmetrically while strictly respecting the underlying physics. Motivated by these limitations, we propose a robust framework for jointly modeling constrained multi-field data. Our approach first leverages a specific PCA procedure for multi-field data, coined row-wise PCA, which has the interesting property of preserving the constraint in the latent space. Since standard PCA strategies for multi-field data do not preserve such constraints, we investigate theoretically the optimality of the row-wise choice. In a second step, we consider a linearly-constrained multi-output GP approach based on a specific kernel parametrization which is trained on the latent space of row-wise PCA. The proposed framework is validated on a population dynamics problem and on an industrial CFD application, which involves the prediction of Reynolds stress tensor components under the incompressibility constraint.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Robust a posteriori estimation of probit-lognormal seismic fragility curves via sequential design of experiments and constrained reference prior

A seismic fragility curve expresses the probability of failure of a structure conditional to an intensity measure (IM) derived from seismic signals. When only limited data is available, the practitioner often refers to the probit-lognormal model coupled with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to obtain estimates of these curves. This means that only a binary indicator of the state (BIS) of the structure is known, namely a failure or non-failure state indicator, when it is subjected to a seismic signal with an intensity measure IM. In this context, the objective of this work is to propose a method for optimally estimating such curves by obtaining the most precise estimate possible with the minimum of data. The novelty of our work is twofold. First, we present and show how to mitigate the likelihood degeneracy problem which is ubiquitous with small data sets and hampers frequentist approaches such as MLE. Second, we propose a novel strategy for sequential design of experiments (DoE) that selects seismic signals from a large database of synthetic or real signals via their IM values, to be applied to structures to evaluate the corresponding BISs. This strategy relies on a criterion based on information theory in a Bayesian framework. It therefore aims to sequentially designate the IM value such that the pair (IM, BIS) has on average, with respect to the BIS of the structure, the greatest impact on the posterior distribution of the fragility curve. The methodology is applied to a case study from the nuclear industry. The results demonstrate its ability to efficiently and robustly estimate the fragility curve, and to avoid degeneracy even with a limited amount of data, i.e., less than 100. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the estimates quickly reach the model bias induced by the probit-lognormal modeling. Eventually, two criteria are suggested to help the user stop the DoE algorithm.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2025

Variational inference for approximate objective priors using neural networks

In Bayesian statistics, the choice of the prior can have an important influence on the posterior and the parameter estimation, especially when few data samples are available. To limit the added subjectivity from a priori information, one can use the framework of objective priors, more particularly, we focus on reference priors in this work. However, computing such priors is a difficult task in general. Hence, we consider cases where the reference prior simplifies to the Jeffreys prior. We develop in this paper a flexible algorithm based on variational inference which computes approximations of priors from a set of parametric distributions using neural networks. We also show that our algorithm can retrieve modified Jeffreys priors when constraints are specified in the optimization problem to ensure the solution is proper. We propose a simple method to recover a relevant approximation of the parametric posterior distribution using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods even if the density function of the parametric prior is not known in general. Numerical experiments on several statistical models of increasing complexity are presented. We show the usefulness of this approach by recovering the target distribution. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on both prior and posterior distributions, jointly using variational inference and MCMC sampling.

stat.ME↗