We develop a methodology to construct low-dimensional predictive models from data sets representing essentially nonlinear (or non-linearizable) dynamical systems with a hyperbolic linear part that are subject to external forcing with finitely many frequencies. Our data-driven, sparse, nonlinear models are obtained as extended normal forms of the reduced dynamics on low-dimensional, attracting spectral submanifolds (SSMs) of the dynamical system. We illustrate the power of data-driven SSM reduction on high-dimensional numerical data sets and experimental measurements involving beam oscillations, vortex shedding and sloshing in a water tank. We find that SSM reduction trained on unforced data also predicts nonlinear response accurately under additional external forcing.

While data-driven model reduction techniques are well-established for linearizable mechanical systems, general approaches to reducing nonlinearizable systems with multiple coexisting steady states have been unavailable. In this paper, we review such a data-driven nonlinear model reduction methodology based on spectral submanifolds. As input, this approach takes observations of unforced nonlinear oscillations to construct normal forms of the dynamics reduced to very low-dimensional invariant manifolds. These normal forms capture amplitude-dependent properties and are accurate enough to provide predictions for nonlinearizable system response under the additions of external forcing. We illustrate these results on examples from structural vibrations, featuring both synthetic and experimental data. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Data-driven prediction in dynamical systems’.

A primary spectral submanifold (SSM) is the unique smoothest nonlinear continuation of a nonresonant spectral subspace E of a dynamical system linearized at a fixed point. Passing from the full nonlinear dynamics to the flow on an attracting primary SSM provides a mathematically precise reduction of the full system dynamics to a very low-dimensional, smooth model in polynomial form. A limitation of this model reduction approach has been, however, that the spectral subspace yielding the SSM must be spanned by eigenvectors of the same stability type. A further limitation has been that in some problems, the nonlinear behavior of interest may be far away from the smoothest nonlinear continuation of the invariant subspace E. Here, we remove both of these limitations by constructing a significantly extended class of SSMs that also contains invariant manifolds with mixed internal stability types and of lower smoothness class arising from fractional powers in their parametrization. We show on examples how fractional and mixed-mode SSMs extend the power of data-driven SSM reduction to transitions in shear flows, dynamic buckling of beams, and periodically forced nonlinear oscillatory systems. More generally, our results reveal the general function library that should be used beyond integer-powered polynomials in fitting nonlinear reduced-order models to data.

We present a fast method for nonlinear data-driven model reduction of dynamical systems onto their slowest nonresonant spectral submanifolds (SSMs). While the recently proposed reduced-order modeling method SSMLearn uses implicit optimization to fit a spectral submanifold to data and reduce the dynamics to a normal form, here, we reformulate these tasks as explicit problems under certain simplifying assumptions. In addition, we provide a novel method for timelag selection when delay-embedding signals from multimodal systems. We show that our alternative approach to data-driven SSM construction yields accurate and sparse rigorous models for essentially nonlinear (or non-linearizable) dynamics on both numerical and experimental datasets. Aside from a major reduction in complexity, our new method allows an increase in the training data dimensionality by several orders of magnitude. This promises to extend data-driven, SSM-based modeling to problems with hundreds of thousands of degrees of freedom.