Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 24, 2026

Experimental Investigation of Secondary Flow Structures Downstream of a Model Type IV Stent Failure in a 180° Curved Artery Test Section
Published on: July 19, 2016
Maximum entropy approach to statistical inference for an ocean acoustic waveguide
D P Knobles1, J D Sagers, R A Koch
1Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78713-8029, USA. knobles@arlut.utexas.edu
Abstract:
A conditional probability distribution suitable for estimating the statistical properties of ocean seabed parameter values inferred from acoustic measurements is derived from a maximum entropy principle. The specification of the expectation value for an error function constrains the maximization of an entropy functional. This constraint determines the sensitivity factor (β) to the error function of the resulting probability distribution, which is a canonical form that provides a conservative estimate of the uncertainty of the parameter values. From the conditional distribution, marginal distributions for individual parameters can be determined from integration over the other parameters. The approach is an alternative to obtaining the posterior probability distribution without an intermediary determination of the likelihood function followed by an application of Bayes' rule. In this paper the expectation value that specifies the constraint is determined from the values of the error function for the model solutions obtained from a sparse number of data samples. The method is applied to ocean acoustic measurements taken on the New Jersey continental shelf. The marginal probability distribution for the values of the sound speed ratio at the surface of the seabed and the source levels of a towed source are examined for different geoacoustic model representations.
Related Concept Videos
Deriving the Speed of Sound in a Liquid
The speed of sound in fluids can be derived by considering a mechanical wave propagating...
Sound as Pressure Waves
The pressure fluctuation depends on the difference in displacements between the successive points in the...
Propagation of Uncertainty from Random Error
Entropy
Poisson's And Laplace's Equation
Random Error

