Exploring helical dynamos with machine learning

We use ensemble machine learning algorithms to study the evolution of magnetic fields in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence that is helically forced. Using mean field formalism, we model the electromotive force (EMF) both as a linear and non-linear function of the mean magnetic field and current density. The form of the EMF is determined using regularized linear regression and random forests. We also compare various analytical models to the data using Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. Our results demonstrate that linear regression is largely successful at predicting the EMF and the use of more sophisticated algorithms (random forests, MCMC) do not lead to significant improvement in the fits. We conclude that the data we are looking at is effectively low dimensional and essentially linear. Finally, to encourage further exploration by the community, we provide all of our simulation data and analysis scripts as open source \textsc{IPython} notebooks.