TY - JOUR A1 - Ayanbayev, Birzhan A1 - Klebanov, Ilja A1 - Li, Han Cheng A1 - Sullivan, Tim J. T1 - Gamma-convergence of Onsager-Machlup functionals T2 - Inverse problems : an international journal of inverse problems, inverse methods and computerised inversion of data N2 - The Bayesian solution to a statistical inverse problem can be summarised by a mode of the posterior distribution, i.e. a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator. The MAP estimator essentially coincides with the (regularised) variational solution to the inverse problem, seen as minimisation of the Onsager-Machlup (OM) functional of the posterior measure. An open problem in the stability analysis of inverse problems is to establish a relationship between the convergence properties of solutions obtained by the variational approach and by the Bayesian approach. To address this problem, we propose a general convergence theory for modes that is based on the Gamma-convergence of OM functionals, and apply this theory to Bayesian inverse problems with Gaussian and edge-preserving Besov priors. Part II of this paper considers more general prior distributions. KW - Bayesian inverse problems KW - Gamma-convergence KW - maximum a posteriori KW - estimation KW - Onsager-Machlup functional KW - small ball probabilities; KW - transition path theory Y1 - 2021 UR - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62336 SN - 0266-5611 SN - 1361-6420 VL - 38 IS - 2 PB - IOP Publ. Ltd. CY - Bristol ER -