
Chapter 5
Estimation of Probability Measures
Using Aggregate Population Data
5.1 Motivation
In the mathematical modeling of physical and biological systems, situations
often arise where some facet of the underlying dynamics (in the form of a
parameter) is not constant but rather is distributed probabilistically within
the system or across the population under study. While traditional inverse
problems (as discussed in Chapter 3) involve the estimation, given a set of
data/observations, of a fixed set of parameters contained within some finite
dimensional admissible set, models with distr ibuted para meters require the
estimation of a probability measure