Construction of bootstrap confidence intervals on sensitivity indices computed by polynomial chaos expansion

Sensitivity analysis aims at quantifying influence of input parameters dispersion on the output dispersion of a numerical model. When the model evaluation is time consuming, the computation of Sobol' indices based on Monte Carlo method is not applicable and a surrogate model has to be used. Among all approximation methods, polynomial chaos expansion is one of the most efficient to calculate variance-based sensitivity indices. Indeed, their computation is analytically derived from the expansion coefficients but without error estimators of the meta-model approximation. In order to evaluate the reliability of these indices, we propose to build confidence intervals by bootstrap re-sampling on the experimental design used to estimate the polynomial chaos approximation. Since the evaluation of the sensitivity indices is obtained with confidence intervals, it is possible to find a design of experiments allowing the computation of sensitivity indices with a given accuracy. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.