Enhancing piecewise‐defined surrogate response surfaces with adjoints on sets of unstructured samples to solve stochastic inverse problems

Summary Many approaches for solving stochastic inverse problems suffer from both stochastic and deterministic sources of error. The finite number of samples used to construct a solution is a common source of stochastic error. When computational models are expensive to evaluate, surrogate response surfaces are often employed to increase the number of samples available for approximating the solution. This leads to a reduction in finite sampling errors while the deterministic error in the evaluation of each sample is potentially increased. The pointwise accuracy of sampling the surrogate is primarily impacted by two sources of deterministic error: the local order of accuracy in the surrogate and the numerical error from the numerical solution of the model. In this work, we use adjoints to simultaneously give a posteriori error and derivative estimates in order to construct low‐order, piecewise‐defined surrogates on sets of unstructured samples. Several examples demonstrate the computational gains of this approach in obtaining accurate estimates of probabilities for events in the design space of model input parameters. This lays the groundwork for future studies on goal‐oriented adaptive refinement of such surrogates.