  We study an inverse problem of the stochastic optimal control of general
diffusions with performance index having the quadratic penalty term of the
control process. Under mild conditions on the system dynamics, the cost
functions, and the optimal control process, we show that our inverse problem is
well-posed using a stochastic maximum principle. Then, with the well-posedness,
we reduce the inverse problem to some root finding problem of the expectation
of a random variable involved with the value function, which has a unique
solution. Based on this result, we propose a numerical method for our inverse
problem by replacing the expectation above with arithmetic mean of observed
optimal control processes and the corresponding state processes. The recent
progress of numerical analyses of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations enables the
proposed method to be implementable for multi-dimensional cases. In particular,
with the help of the kernel-based collocation method for
Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations, our method for the inverse problems still
works well even when an explicit form of the value function is unavailable.
Several numerical experiments show that the numerical method recovers the
unknown penalty parameter with high accuracy.
