Methods of determining weight scaling factors for geodetic–geophysical joint inversion

Geodetic–geophysical joint inversion is a hybrid inversion of different types of geodetic data, together with geophysical or seismic, geological data. In the joint inversion, weight scaling factors of different datasets are of vital importance and should be fixed properly. This paper aims to analyze the general weight scaling factor fixing methods and to study their impacts on joint inversion. The result, validated and evaluated by the cross validation test method, showed that it is not prudent to fix the inversion parameter only by considering the objective function to be a minimum and that the parameter should be determined by the actual circumstances. At last, a more reliable inversion result was obtained by using the Helmert method of variance components estimation (VCE) for the fixing of weight scaling factor.