Identification of Underlying Dynamic System from Noisy Data with Splines

In this paper, we propose a two-stage method called Spline Assisted Partial Differential Equation involved Model Identification (SAPDEMI) to efficiently identify the underlying partial differential equation (PDE) models from the noisy data. In the first stage – functional estimation stage – we employ the cubic spline to estimate the unobservable derivatives, which serve as candidates included the underlying PDE models. The contribution of this stage is that, it is computational efficient because it only requires the computational complexity of the linear polynomial of the sample size, which achieves the lowest possible order of complexity. In the second stage – model identification stage – we apply Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso) to identify the underlying PDE models. The contribution of this stage is that, we focus on the model selections, while the existing literature mostly focuses on parameter estimations. Moreover, we develop statistical properties of our method for correct identification, where the main tool we use is the primal-dual witness (PDW) method. Finally, we validate our theory through various numerical examples.