MAXIMUM-LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATE FOR DISCONTINUOUS PARAMETER IN STOCHASTIC HYPERBOLIC SYSTEMS

The purpose of this paper is to study the identification problem of a spatially varying discontinuous parameter in stochastic hyperbolic equations. In previous works, the consistency property of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) was explored and the generating algorithm for MLE proposed under the condition that an unknown parameter is in a sufficiently regular space with respect to spatial variables. In order to show the consistency property of the MLE for a discontinuous coefficient, we use the method of sieves, i.e. the admissible class of unknown parameters is projected into a finite-dimensional space. For hyperbolic systems, we cannot obtain a regularity property of the solution with respect to a parameter. So in this paper, the parabolic regularization technique is used. The convergence of the derived finite-dimensional MLE to the infinite-dimensional MLE is justified under some conditions.