Galerkin Method for a Backward Problem of Time-Space Fractional Symmetric Diffusion Equation

We investigate a backward problem of the time-space fractional symmetric diffusion equation with a source term, wherein the negative Laplace operator -Delta contained in the main equation belongs to the category of uniformly symmetric elliptic operators. The problem is ill-posed because the solution does not depend continuously on the measured data. In this paper, the existence and uniqueness of the solution and the conditional stability for the inverse problem are given and proven. Based on the least squares technique, we construct a Galerkin regularization method to overcome the ill-posedness of the considered problem. Under a priori and a posteriori selection rules for the regularization parameter, the Holder-type convergence results of optimal order for the proposed method are derived. Meanwhile, we verify the regularized effect of our method by carrying out some numerical experiments where the initial value function is a smooth function or a non-smooth one. Numerical results show that this method works well in dealing with the backward problem of the time-space fractional parabolic equation.

Automated summary

This paper investigates a backward problem of the time-space fractional symmetric diffusion equation with a source term. It provides the existence and uniqueness of the solution and the conditional stability for the inverse problem, and proposes a Galerkin regularization method based on the least squares technique to overcome the ill-posedness of the problem. The method is verified through numerical experiments and shown to work well in dealing with the backward problem of the time-space fractional parabolic equation.