Salt water intrussion assessment using vertical electrical soundings, global optimisation methods and support vector machines

Geophysical inverse problems are ill-posed: the objective function has its minimum in a flat<br>elongated valley or surrounded by many local minima. Local optimization methods give unpredictable<br>results if no prior information is available. Traditionally this has generated mistrust on the use of<br>geophysical inverse methods (equivalence problem in VES).