Efficient and faithful reconstruction of dynamical attractors using homogeneous differentiators

TL;DR

This paper introduces Homogeneous Differentiators as a novel method for de-noising and accurately reconstructing attractors of nonlinear dynamical systems from noisy, limited data, outperforming existing techniques in quality and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a new approach using Homogeneous Differentiators with theoretical guarantees, enhancing attractor reconstruction from noisy measurements and integrating well with existing embedding methods.

Findings

Significantly improved attractor reconstruction quality.

Reduced computational time compared to existing methods.

Effective on both simulated models and real EEG data.

Abstract

Reconstructing the attractors of complex nonlinear dynamical systems from available measurements is key to analyse and predict their time evolution. Existing attractor reconstruction methods typically rely on topological embedding and may produce poor reconstructions, which differ significantly from the actual attractor, because measurements are corrupted by noise and often available only for some of the state variables and/or their combinations, and the time series are often relatively short. Here, we propose the use of Homogeneous Differentiators (HD) to effectively de-noise measurements and more faithfully reconstruct attractors of nonlinear systems. Homogeneous Differentiators are supported by rigorous theoretical guarantees about their de-noising capabilities, and their results can be fruitfully combined with time-delay embedding, differential embedding and functional observability. We apply our proposed HD-based methodology to simulated dynamical models of increasing complexity, from the Lorenz system to the Hindmarsh-Rose model and the Epileptor model for neural dynamics, as well as to empirical data of EEG recordings. In the presence of corrupting noise of various types, we obtain drastically improved quality and resolution of the reconstructed attractors, as well as significantly reduced computational time, which can be orders of magnitude lower than that of alternative methods. Our tests show the flexibility and effectiveness of Homogeneous Differentiators and suggest that they can become the tool of choice for preprocessing noisy signals and reconstructing attractors of highly nonlinear dynamical systems from both theoretical models and real data.