Statistics of SPDEs: From Linear to Nonlinear

Abstract

We study statistical inference for stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). Though inference linear SPDEs have been studied well (with lot of problems still remain to be investigated) in the last two decades, inference for nonlinear SPDEs is in its infancy. The inference methods use both inference for finite-dimensional diffusions and inference for classical i.i.d. sequences. Solving 2D Navier-Stokes equation is one of the challenging problem of the last century. However, with additive white noise, the equation has a strong solution. We estimate the viscosity coefficient of the 2D stochastic Navier-Stokes (SNS) equation by minimum contrast method. We show $n$ consistency in contrast to $\sqrt n$ consistency in the classical i.i.d. case where $n$ is the number of observations. We consider both continuous and discrete observations in time. We also obtain the Berry-Esseen bounds. Then we estimate and control the Type I and Type II error of a simple hypothesis testing problem of the viscosity coefficient of the SNS equation. We study a class of rejection regions and provide thresholds that guarantee that the statistical errors are smaller than the given upper bound. The tests are of likelihood ratio type. The proofs are based on the large deviation bounds. Finally we give Monte Carlo test procedure for simulated data.