This paper investigates the recovery for time-dependent coefficient and free boundary for heat equation. They are considered under mass/energy specification and Stefan conditions. The main issue with this problem is that the solution is unstable and sensitive to small contamination of noise in the input data. The Crank-Nicolson finite difference method (FDM) is utilized to solve the direct problem, whilst the inverse problem is viewed as a nonlinear optimization problem. The latter problem is solved numerically using the routine optimization toolbox lsqnonlin from MATLAB. Consequently, the Tikhonov regularization method is used in order to gain stable solutions. The results were compared with their exact solution and tested via

In this article, an inverse problem of finding timewise-dependent thermal conductivity has been investigated numerically. Numerical solution of forward (direct) problem has been solved by finite-difference method (FDM). Whilst, the inverse (indirect) problem solved iteratively using Lsqnonlin   routine  from MATLAB. Initial guess for unknown coefficient expressed by explicit relation   based on nonlocal overdetermination conditions and intial input data .The obtained numrical results are presented and discussed in several figures and tables. These results are accurate and stable even in the presense of noisy data.