Jun 2026· 2 citations· ⚡ 1 influential· 84 references
Computer ScienceMathematics
TL;DR
This manuscript gives an overview of the filtering mechanism behind the weak formulation and provides a bias-variance error decomposition, and combines a weak formulation with a kernel learning strategy to propose Weak-form Kernel Ridge Regression (WKRR) for learning dynamical systems.
Abstract
Accurate prediction of complex dynamical systems from noisy measurements remains a significant challenge in scientific computing. Kernel ridge regression learning strategies are often effective when applied to clean data, but have limited success with noisy data. Recent work has observed that a weak formulation can act to filter noisy data, and different learning strategies have achieved increased noise robustness with a weak-form framework. In this manuscript, we give an overview of the filtering mechanism behind the weak formulation and provide a bias-variance error decomposition. Using these insights, we combine a weak formulation with a kernel learning strategy to propose Weak-form Kernel Ridge Regression (WKRR) for learning dynamical systems. The proposed framework is simple to implement, effective for both clean and noisy data, and outperforms several baseline methods. We demonstrate the performance of WKRR on chaotic benchmark systems in up to 64 dimensions, as well as 15,000-dimensional real-world fluid data.
It is demonstrated that the squared Pearson correlation coefficient provides a simple quantitative criterion for distinguishing chaos from noise directly from observed time-series data.
We present a machine learning framework for identifying sparse, interpretable models of dynamical systems directly from time-series data. Our approach parameterizes the underlying vector field using a neural architecture and trains it by minimizing a multi-step prediction loss over a finite horizon. To ensure numerical tractability, we optimize a mean absolute error objective averaged across prediction steps, and progressively increase the horizon during training. A key feature of this formulation is that it enforces consistency under repeated composition of the learned dynamics. As a result, the identified models exhibit significantly improved stability compared with approaches based on one-step regression of the vector field. When combined with sparsity-promoting regularization, this leads to parsimonious models that generalize beyond the training data. We demonstrate accurate recovery of systems exhibiting a wide range of behaviors, including stable and unstable fixed points, periodic orbits, and chaotic attractors. For chaotic systems, while long-term trajectory prediction is inherently limited by sensitivity to initial conditions, we show that multi-step training yields models with accurate short-term dynamics and strong agreement in long-time statistical properties, including mean, variance, and Lyapunov exponents. Moreover, we establish theoretical bounds linking trajectory error to statistical accuracy, providing a step toward a principled explanation for this behavior.
Low-dimensional chaotic systems such as the Lorenz-63 model are commonly used to benchmark system-agnostic methods for learning dynamics from data. This study shows that learning from noise-free observations in such systems can be achieved up to machine precision: using ordinary least squares regression on high-degree polynomial features with 512-bit arithmetic, a system-agnostic method is introduced that matches the accuracy of standard 64-bit numerical ODE solvers using the systems’ governing equations. For the Lorenz-63 system, the method achieves valid prediction times of 36 Lyapunov times, and even up to 105 Lyapunov times with favorable precision configurations, dramatically outperforming prior work, which reaches 13 Lyapunov times at most. The results are further validated on Thomas’ Cyclically Symmetric Attractor, a non-polynomial chaotic system that is considerably more complex than the Lorenz-63 model, and similar results extend to higher dimensions using the spatiotemporally chaotic Lorenz-96 model. These findings suggest that forecasting low-dimensional chaotic systems from noise-free data is effectively a solved problem.
We study the reconstruction of an unknown dynamical system from a single noisy scalar time series. The goal is to recover the underlying dynamics for forecasting. We introduce a method that uses differential embedding coordinates to identify a rational closure of the embedding dynamics directly from data. The closure is identified through a weak-form regression pipeline, which avoids unstable pointwise differentiation of noisy data. When applied to noise-free Lorenz and R\"ossler systems, the method recovers closures that support long forecasts across a broad ensemble of realizations ($18.1$ and $7.1$ Lyapunov times respectively). Under $15$--$30\%$ additive Gaussian noise, performance becomes system-dependent. For the Lorenz system, forecast horizons remain short even in the best cases, whereas the R\"ossler system generally performs better in absolute terms, though not once normalized by the Lyapunov time. Our proposed method recovers directly interpretable closure coefficients which we compared against the known analytic closures of the Lorenz and R\"ossler systems.
We propose a nonparametric method to learn the Lévy density from data consisting of the process’s probability densities. We recast the problem as identifying the kernel of a nonlocal integral operator from discrete or noisy data, which leads to an ill-posed inverse problem. To regularize it, we construct an adaptive reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) whose kernel is built directly from the data. Under source and spectral decay conditions, we show that the reconstruction error decays with the mesh size at a near-optimal rate. Importantly, we develop a generalized singular value decomposition-based bilevel optimization algorithm to select the regularization parameter, resulting in efficient and robust computation of the regularized estimator. Numerical experiments for several Lévy densities, drift fields and data types (PDE-based densities and sample ensemble-based kernel density estimation reconstructions) demonstrate that our bilevel RKHS method provides a more stable and competitive alternative to classical L-curve and generalized cross-validation strategies and that the adaptive RKHS norm is more accurate and robust than Lρ2- and ℓ2-norms for regularization.
It is shown that the method consistently identifies compact governing equations while maintaining strong long-horizon predictive accuracy across canonical nonlinear systems and representative industrial processes, even under noisy and distribution-shifted data.