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.
Multi-step training of sparse, interpretable models of dynamical systems directly from time-series data yields models with accurate short-term dynamics and strong agreement in long-time statistical properties, including mean, variance, and Lyapunov exponents.
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, suggesting 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.
Numerical experiments demonstrate that the 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.