Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is a computational framework for systematically measuring how uncertainty in the inputs of a model propagates into uncertainty in its outputs. Building on Wiener's polynomial chaos theory (1938) and formalised for general stochastic problems by Xiu and Karniadakis (2002), UQ uses two primary strategies: Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE), which represents the model output as a series of orthogonal polynomials matched to the input distributions, and Kriging (Gaussian process) surrogates, which replace an expensive simulation with a fast statistical approximation fitted to a small set of carefully chosen runs.