The Fundamental Subspaces of Ensemble Kalman Inversion

Abstract

SIAM Review, Volume 67, Issue 4, Page 771-798, December 2025.
Abstract.Ensemble Kalman inversion (EKI) methods are a family of iterative methods for solving weighted least squares problems, especially those arising in scientific and engineering inverse problems in which unknown parameters or states are estimated from observed data by minimizing the weighted square norm of the data misfit. Implementation of EKI only requires the evaluation of the forward model mapping the unknown to the data, and does not require derivatives or adjoints of the forward model. The methods therefore offer an attractive alternative to gradient-based optimization approaches in inverse problem settings where evaluating derivatives or adjoints of the forward model is computationally intractable. This work presents a new analysis of the behavior of both deterministic and stochastic versions of basic EKI for linear observation operators, resulting in a natural interpretation of EKI’s convergence properties in terms of “fundamental subspaces” analogous to Strang’s fundamental subspaces of linear algebra. Our analysis directly examines the discrete EKI iterations instead of their continuous-time limits considered in previous analyses, and it provides spectral decompositions that define six fundamental subspaces of EKI spanning both observation and state spaces. This approach verifies convergence rates previously derived for continuous-time limits, and yields new results describing both deterministic and stochastic EKI convergence behavior with respect to the standard minimum-norm weighted least squares solution in terms of the fundamental subspaces. Numerical experiments illustrate our theoretical results.