Guang Lin, Uncertainty Quantification and Data-driven Discovery for High-dimensional Complex Systems with Multimodal Distribution

February 1, 2:30pm, Room 103 John T. Rettaliata Engineering Center

Experience suggests that uncertainties often play an important role in quantifying the performance of complex systems. Therefore, uncertainty needs to be treated as a core element in the modeling, simulation, and optimization of complex systems. The field of uncertainty quantification (UQ) has received an increasing amount of attention. Extensive research efforts have been devoted to it and many novel numerical techniques have been developed. These techniques aim to conduct stochastic simulations for very large-scale complex systems.

In this talk, we will present some effective new ways of dealing with the challenges facing uncertainty quantification community including high-dimensionality, discontinuities, “multi-modal”, model-form uncertainties, UQ for computational-expensive models, UQ for machine learning and data science, etc.

Particularly, a rotation-based compressive sensing technique is developed for high-dimensional UQ problem. Adaptive importance sampling techniques will be discussed for handling multi-modal problems. We demonstrate that we can use emerging, large-scale spatiotemporal data from modern sensors to directly construct and discover, in an adaptive manner, governing equations, even nonlinear dynamics, that best model the system and quantifying the uncertainties in the learning process. Several specific examples of flow and transport in randomly heterogeneous porous media and climate models will be presented to illustrate the main idea of our approaches.


Guang Lin is the Director of Purdue Data Science Consulting Services, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Department of Statistics, and School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He was awarded the B.S. in Mechanics from Zhejiang University in 1997 and the Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 2007. He worked as a staff scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (2007-2014) before he joined the faculty of Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering in 2014.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.