Jakeman, Anthony J. | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2024

Assessing convergence in global sensitivity analysis: a review of methods for assessing and monitoring convergence

In global sensitivity analysis (GSA) of a model, a proper convergence analysis of metrics is essential for ensuring a level of confidence or trustworthiness in sensitivity results obtained, yet is somewhat deficient in practice. The level of confidence in sensitivity measures, particularly in relation to their influence and support for decisions from scientific, social and policy perspectives, is heavily reliant on the convergence of GSA. We review the literature and summarize the available methods for monitoring and assessing convergence of sensitivity measures based on application purposes. The aim is to expose the various choices for convergence assessment and encourage further testing of available methods to clarify their level of robustness. Furthermore, the review identifies a pressing need for comparative studies on convergence assessment methods to establish a clear hierarchy of effectiveness and encourages the adoption of systematic approaches for enhanced robustness in sensitivity analysis.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2023

A Decision-Relevant Factor-Fixing Framework: Application to Uncertainty Analysis of a High-Dimensional Water Quality Model

Factor Fixing (FF) is a common method for reducing the number of model parameters to lower computational cost. FF typically starts with distinguishing the insensitive parameters from the sensitive and pursues uncertainty quantification (UQ) on the resulting reduced-order model, fixing each insensitive parameter at a fixed value. There is a need, however, to expand such a common approach to consider the effects of decision choices in the FF-UQ procedure on metrics of interest. Therefore, to guide the use of FF and increase confidence in the resulting dimension-reduced model, we propose a new adaptive framework consisting of four principles: (a) re-parameterize the model first to reduce obvious non-identifiable parameter combinations, (b) focus on decision relevance especially with respect to errors in quantities of interest (QoI), (c) conduct adaptive evaluation and robustness assessment of errors in the QoI across FF choices as sample size increases, and (d) reconsider whether fixing is warranted. The framework is demonstrated on a spatially-distributed water quality model. The error in estimates of QoI caused by FF can be estimated using a Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) surrogate model. Built with 70 model runs, the surrogate is computationally inexpensive to evaluate and can provide global sensitivity indices for free. For the selected catchment, just two factors may provide an acceptably accurate estimate of model uncertainty in the average annual load of Total Suspended Solids (TSS), suggesting that reducing the uncertainty in these two parameters is a priority for future work before undertaking further formal uncertainty quantification.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗