Extracting governing equations from data is a central challenge in many diverse areas of science and engineering. Data are abundant whereas models often remain elusive, as in climate science, neuroscience, ecology, finance, and epidemiology, to name only a few examples. In this work, we combine sparsity-promoting techniques and machine learning with nonlinear dynamical systems to discover governing equations from noisy measurement data. The only assumption about the structure of the model is that there are only a few important terms that govern the dynamics, so that the equations are sparse in the space of possible functions; this assumption holds for many physical systems in an appropriate basis. In particular, we use sparse regression to determine the fewest terms in the dynamic governing equations required to accurately represent the data. This results in parsimonious models that balance accuracy with model complexity to avoid overfitting. We demonstrate the algorithm on a wide range of problems, from simple canonical systems, including linear and nonlinear oscillators and the chaotic Lorenz system, to the fluid vortex shedding behind an obstacle. The fluid example illustrates the ability of this method to discover the underlying dynamics of a system that took experts in the community nearly 30 years to resolve. We also show that this method generalizes to parameterized systems and systems that are time-varying or have external forcing. dynamical systems | machine learning | sparse regression | system identification | optimization A dvances in machine learning (1) and data science (2) have promised a renaissance in the analysis and understanding of complex data, extracting patterns in vast multimodal data that are beyond the ability of humans to grasp. However, despite the rapid development of tools to understand static data based on statistical relationships, there has been slow progress in distilling physical models of dynamic processes from big data. This has limited the ability of data science models to extrapolate the dynamics beyond the attractor where they were sampled and constructed.An analogy may be drawn with the discoveries of Kepler and Newton. Kepler, equipped with the most extensive and accurate planetary data of the era, developed a data-driven model for planetary motion, resulting in his famous elliptic orbits. However, this was an attractor-based view of the world, and it did not explain the fundamental dynamic relationships that give rise to planetary orbits, or provide a model for how these bodies react when perturbed. Newton, in contrast, discovered a dynamic relationship between momentum and energy that described the underlying processes responsible for these elliptic orbits. This dynamic model may be generalized to predict behavior in regimes where no data were collected. Newton's model has proven remarkably robust for engineering design, making it possible to land a spacecraft on the moon, which would not have been possible using Kepler's model alone.A seminal breakthrough by Bongard a...

Researchers propose sparse regression for identifying governing partial differential equations for spatiotemporal systems.

Abstract. We develop a new method which extends dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) to incorporate the effect of control to extract low-order models from high-dimensional, complex systems. DMD finds spatial-temporal coherent modes, connects local-linear analysis to nonlinear operator theory, and provides an equation-free architecture which is compatible with compressive sensing. In actuated systems, DMD is incapable of producing an input-output model; moreover, the dynamics and the modes will be corrupted by external forcing. Our new method, dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc), capitalizes on all of the advantages of DMD and provides the additional innovation of being able to disambiguate between the underlying dynamics and the effects of actuation, resulting in accurate input-output models. The method is data-driven in that it does not require knowledge of the underlying governing equations-only snapshots in time of observables and actuation data from historical, experimental, or black-box simulations. We demonstrate the method on high-dimensional dynamical systems, including a model with relevance to the analysis of infectious disease data with mass vaccination (actuation).

Understanding the interplay of order and disorder in chaos is a central challenge in modern quantitative science. Approximate linear representations of nonlinear dynamics have long been sought, driving considerable interest in Koopman theory. We present a universal, data-driven decomposition of chaos as an intermittently forced linear system. This work combines delay embedding and Koopman theory to decompose chaotic dynamics into a linear model in the leading delay coordinates with forcing by low-energy delay coordinates; this is called the Hankel alternative view of Koopman (HAVOK) analysis. This analysis is applied to the Lorenz system and real-world examples including Earth’s magnetic field reversal and measles outbreaks. In each case, forcing statistics are non-Gaussian, with long tails corresponding to rare intermittent forcing that precedes switching and bursting phenomena. The forcing activity demarcates coherent phase space regions where the dynamics are approximately linear from those that are strongly nonlinear.