3-D inversion of magnetic data based on the L1–L2 norm regularization

Abstract

Magnetic inversion is one of the popular methods to obtain information about the subsurface structure. However, many of the conventional methods have a serious problem, that is, the linear equations to be solved become ill-posed, under-determined, and thus, the uniqueness of the solution is not guaranteed. As a result, several different models fit the observed magnetic data with the same accuracy. To reduce the non-uniqueness of the model, conventional studies introduced regularization method based on the quadratic solution norm. However, these regularization methods impose a certain level of smoothness, and as the result, the resultant model is likely to be blurred. To obtain a focused magnetic model, I introduce L1 norm regularization. As is widely known, L1 norm regularization promotes sparseness of the model. So, it is expected that, the resulting model is constructed only with the features truly required to reconstruct data and, as a result, a simple and focused model is obtained. However, by using L1 norm regularization solely, an excessively concentrated model is obtained due to the nature of the L1 norm regularization and a lack of linear independence of the magnetic equations. To overcome this problem, I use a combination of L1 and L2 norm regularization. To choose a feasible regularization parameter, I introduce a regularization parameter selection method based on the L-curve criterion with fixing the mixing ratio of L1 and L2 norm regularization. This inversion method is applied to a real magnetic anomaly data observed on Hokkaido Island, northern Japan and reveals the subsurface magnetic structure on this area.