Abstract
A methodology to utilize lots of accumulated observation data is one of the important topics. The concept of sparse modeling attracts much attention from various fields. It can be interpreted to be one of regularization method in inverse problem. It is reported that it is successfully used in many problems like medical MRI. After illustrating the concept and formulation of sparse modeling with a simple example, the authors shows a inverse problem in which earth pressure is estimated by observed displacement of retaining wall as an example of application in civil engineering. The distribution of earth pressuer is estimated depending on the assumued sparsity. Though more study on the applicability to civil engineering problems is required, the concept of sparse modeling seems useful for various problems.
