Bayesian inference of a lake water quality model by emulating its posterior density

We use a Gaussian stochastic process emulator to interpolate the posterior probability density of a computationally demanding application of the biogeochemical-ecological lake model BELAMO to accelerate statistical inference of deterministic model and error model parameters. The deterministic model consists of a mechanistic description of key processes influencing the mass balance of nutrients, dissolved oxygen, organic particles, and phytoplankton and zooplankton in the lake. This model is complemented by a Gaussian stochastic process to describe the remaining model bias and by Normal, independent observation errors. A small subsample of the Markov chain representing the posterior of the model parameters is propagated through the full model to get model predictions and uncertainty estimates. We expect this approximation to be more accurate at only slightly higher computational costs compared to using a Normal approximation to the posterior probability density and linear error propagation to the results as we did in an earlier paper. The performance of the two techniques is compared for a didactical example as well as for the lake model. As expected, for the didactical example, the use of the emulator led to posterior marginals of the model parameters that are closer to those calculated by Markov chain simulation using the full model than those based on the Normal approximation. For the lake model, the new technique proved applicable without an excessive increase in computational requirements, but we faced challenges in the choice of the design data set for emulator calibration. As the posterior is a scalar function of the parameters, the suggested technique is an alternative to the emulation of a potentially more complex, structured output of the simulation model that allows for the use of a less case-specific emulator. This is at the cost that still the full model has to be used for prediction (which can be done with a smaller, approximately independent subsample of the Markov chain).