Bayesian interpretation described below. Other approaches include the discrepancy principle, cross-validation, L-curve method, restricted maximum likelihood and unbiased predictive risk estimator. Grace Wahba proved that the optimal parameter, in the sense of leave-one-out cross-validation minimizes where is the residual sum of squares, and is the effective number of degrees of freedom. Using the previous SVD decomposition, we can simplify the above expression: and Relation to probabilistic formulation The probabilistic formulation of an inverse problem introduces (when all uncertainties are Gaussian) a covariance matrix representing the a priori uncertainties on the model parameters, and a covariance matrix representing the uncertainties on the observed parameters. In the special case when these two matrices are diagonal and isotropic, and , and, in this case, the equations of inverse theory reduce to the equations above, with . Bayesian interpretation Although at first the choice of the solution to this regularized problem may look artificial, and indeed the matrix seems rather arbitrary, the process can be justified from a Bayesian point of view. Note that for an ill-posed problem one must necessarily introduce some additional assumptions in order to get a unique solution. Statistically, the prior probability distribution of is sometimes taken to be a multivariate normal distribution. For simplicity here, the following assumptions are made: the means are zero; their components are independent; the components have the same standard deviation . The data are also subject to errors, and the errors in are also assumed to be independent with zero mean and standard deviation . Under these assumptions the Tikhonov-regularized solution is the most probable solution given the data and the a priori distribution of , according to Bayes' theorem. If the assumption of normality is replaced by assumptions of homoscedasticity and uncorrelatedness of errors, and if one still assumes zero mean, then the Gauss–Markov theorem entails that the solution is the minimal unbiased linear estimator. See also LASSO estimator is another regularization method in statistics. Elastic net regularization Matrix regularization Notes References Further reading Linear algebra Estimation methods Inverse problems Regression analysis