Reconstruction, forecasting, and stability of chaotic dynamics from partial data

The forecasting and computation of the stability of chaotic systems from partial observations are tasks for which traditional equation-based methods may not be suitable. In this computational paper, we propose data-driven methods to (i) infer the dynamics of unobserved (hidden) chaotic variables (full-state reconstruction); (ii) time forecast the evolution of the full state; and (iii) infer the stability properties of the full state. The tasks are performed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, which are trained with observations (data) limited to only part of the state: (i) the low-to-high resolution LSTM (LH-LSTM), which takes partial observations as training input, and requires access to the full system state when computing the loss; and (ii) the physics-informed LSTM (PI-LSTM), which is designed to combine partial observations with the integral formulation of the dynamical system's evolution equations. First, we derive the Jacobian of the LSTMs. Second, we analyse a chaotic partial differential equation, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS), and the Lorenz-96 system. We show that the proposed networks can forecast the hidden variables, both time-accurately and statistically. The Lyapunov exponents and covariant Lyapunov vectors, which characterize the stability of the chaotic attractors, are correctly inferred from partial observations. Third, the PI-LSTM outperforms the LH-LSTM by successfully reconstructing the hidden chaotic dynamics when the input dimension is smaller or similar to the Kaplan-Yorke dimension of the attractor. This work opens new opportunities for reconstructing the full state, inferring hidden variables, and computing the stability of chaotic systems from partial data.

Physics-Informed Long Short-Term Memory for Forecasting and Reconstruction of Chaos

We present the Physics-Informed Long Short-Term Memory (PI-LSTM) network to reconstruct and predict the evolution of unmeasured variables in a chaotic system. The training is constrained by a regularization term, which penalizes solutions that violate the system's governing equations. The network is showcased on the Lorenz-96 model, a prototypical chaotic dynamical system, for a varying number of variables to reconstruct. First, we show the PI-LSTM architecture and explain how to constrain the differential equations, which is a non-trivial task in LSTMs. Second, the PI-LSTM is numerically evaluated in the long-term autonomous evolution to study its ergodic properties. We show that it correctly predicts the statistics of the unmeasured variables, which cannot be achieved without the physical constraint. Third, we compute the Lyapunov exponents of the network to infer the key stability properties of the chaotic system. For reconstruction purposes, adding the physics-informed loss qualitatively enhances the dynamical behaviour of the network, compared to a data-driven only training. This is quantified by the agreement of the Lyapunov exponents. This work opens up new opportunities for state reconstruction and learning of the dynamics of nonlinear systems.

Dynamical Landscape and Multistability of the Earth's Climate

We apply two independent data analysis methodologies to locate stable climate states in an intermediate complexity climate model. First, drawing from the theory of quasipotentials, and viewing the state space as an energy landscape with valleys and mountain ridges, we infer the relative likelihood of the identified multistable climate states, and investigate the most likely transition trajectories as well as the expected transition times between them. Second, harnessing techniques from data science, specifically manifold learning, we characterize the data landscape of the simulation data to find climate states and basin boundaries within a fully agnostic and unsupervised framework. Both approaches show remarkable agreement, and reveal, apart from the well known warm and snowball earth states, a third intermediate stable state in one of the two climate models we consider. The combination of our approaches allows to identify how the negative feedback of ocean heat transport and entropy production via the hydrological cycle drastically change the topography of the dynamical landscape of Earth's climate.