Determining a parabolic system by boundary observation of its non-negative solutions with biological applications

In this paper, we consider the inverse problem of determining some coefficients within a coupled nonlinear parabolic system, through boundary observation of its non-negative solutions. In the physical setup, the non-negative solutions represent certain probability densities in different contexts. We innovate the successive linearisation method by further developing a high-order variation scheme which can both ensure the positivity of the solutions and effectively tackle the nonlinear inverse problem. This enables us to establish several novel unique identifiability results for the inverse problem in a rather general setup. For a theoretical perspective, our study addresses an important topic in partial differential equation (PDE) analysis on how to characterise the function spaces generated by the products of non-positive solutions of parabolic PDEs. As a typical and practically interesting application, we apply our general results to inverse problems for ecological population models, where the positive solutions signify the population densities.