Search NASA⌕ Search

Engineering topics

Peherstorfer, Benjamin

Publications and source records attributed to Peherstorfer, Benjamin.

Learning Nonlinear Reduced Models from Data with Operator Inference

This review discusses Operator Inference, a nonintrusive reduced modeling approach that incorporates physical governing equations by defining a structured polynomial form for the reduced model, and then learns the corresponding reduced operators from simulated training data. The polynomial model form of Operator Inference is sufficiently expressive to cover a wide range of nonlinear dynamics found in fluid mechanics and other fields of science and engineering, while still providing efficient reduced model computations. The learning steps of Operator Inference are rooted in classical projection-based model reduction; thus, some of the rich theory of model reduction can be applied to models learned with Operator Inference. This connection to projection-based model reduction theory offers a pathway toward deriving error estimates and gaining insights to improve predictions. Furthermore, through formulations of Operator Inference that preserve Hamiltonian and other structures, important physical properties such as energy conservation can be guaranteed in the predictions of the reduced model beyond the training horizon. This review illustrates key computational steps of Operator Inference through a large-scale combustion example.

Mechanics↗

Operator inference with roll outs for learning reduced models from scarce and low-quality data

Data-driven modeling has become a key building block in computational science and engineering. However, data that are available in science and engineering are typically scarce, often polluted with noise and affected by measurement errors and other perturbations, which makes learning the dynamics of systems challenging. Here, in this work, we propose to combine data-driven modeling via operator inference with the dynamic training via roll outs of neural ordinary differential equations. Operator inference with roll outs inherits interpretability, scalability, and structure preservation of traditional operator inference while leveraging the dynamic training via roll outs over multiple time steps to increase stability and robustness for learning from low-quality and noisy data. Numerical experiments with data describing shallow water waves and surface quasi-geostrophic dynamics demonstrate that operator inference with roll outs provides predictive models from training trajectories even if data are sampled sparsely in time and polluted with noise of up to 10%.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Context-aware learning of hierarchies of low-fidelity models for multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification

Multi-fidelity Monte Carlo methods leverage low-fidelity and surrogate models for variance reduction to make tractable uncertainty quantification even when numerically simulating the physical systems of interest with high-fidelity models is computationally expensive. This work proposes a context-aware multi-fidelity Monte Carlo method that optimally balances the costs of training low-fidelity models with the costs of Monte Carlo sampling. It generalizes the previously developed context-aware bi-fidelity Monte Carlo method to hierarchies of multiple models and to more general types of low-fidelity models. When training low-fidelity models, the proposed approach takes into account the context in which the learned low-fidelity models will be used, namely for variance reduction in Monte Carlo estimation, which allows it to find optimal trade-offs between training and sampling to minimize upper bounds of the mean-squared errors of the estimators for given computational budgets. This is in stark contrast to traditional surrogate modeling and model reduction techniques that construct low-fidelity models with the primary goal of approximating well the high-fidelity model outputs and typically ignore the context in which the learned models will be used in upstream tasks. Further, the proposed context-aware multi-fidelity Monte Carlo method applies to hierarchies of a wide range of types of low-fidelity models such as sparse-grid and deep-network models. Numerical experiments with the gyrokinetic simulation code Gene show speedups of up to two orders of magnitude compared to standard estimators when quantifying uncertainties in small-scale fluctuations in confined plasma in fusion reactors. This corresponds to a runtime reduction from 72 days to four hours on one node of the Lonestar6 supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Physics-informed regularization and structure preservation for learning stable reduced models from data with operator inference

Operator inference learns low-dimensional dynamical-system models with polynomial nonlinear terms from trajectories of high-dimensional physical systems (non-intrusive model reduction). Here, this work focuses on the large class of physical systems that can be well described by models with quadratic and cubic nonlinear terms and proposes a regularizer for operator inference that induces a stability bias onto learned models. The proposed regularizer is physics informed in the sense that it penalizes higher-order terms with large norms and so explicitly leverages the polynomial model form that is given by the underlying physics. This means that the proposed approach judiciously learns from data and physical insights combined, rather than from either data or physics alone. Additionally, a formulation of operator inference is proposed that enforces model constraints for preserving structure such as symmetry and definiteness in linear terms. Numerical results demonstrate that models learned with operator inference and the proposed regularizer and structure preservation are accurate and stable even in cases where using no regularization and Tikhonov regularization leads to models that are unstable.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Probabilistic error estimation for non-intrusive reduced models learned from data of systems governed by linear parabolic partial differential equations

This work derives a residual-based a posteriori error estimator for reduced models learned with non-intrusive model reduction from data of high-dimensional systems governed by linear parabolic partial differential equations with control inputs. It is shown that quantities that are necessary for the error estimator can be either obtained exactly as the solutions of least-squares problems in a non-intrusive way from data such as initial conditions, control inputs, and high-dimensional solution trajectories or bounded in a probabilistic sense. Here, the computational procedure follows an offline/online decomposition. In the offline (training) phase, the high-dimensional system is judiciously solved in a black-box fashion to generate data and to set up the error estimator. In the online phase, the estimator is used to bound the error of the reduced-model predictions for new initial conditions and new control inputs without recourse to the high-dimensional system. Numerical results demonstrate the workflow of the proposed approach from data to reduced models to certified predictions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Sampling Low-Dimensional Markovian Dynamics for Preasymptotically Recovering Reduced Models from Data with Operator Inference

This work introduces a method for learning low-dimensional models from data of high-dimensional black-box dynamical systems. The novelty is that the learned models are exactly the reduced models that are traditionally constructed with classical projection-based model reduction techniques. Thus, the proposed approach learns models that are guaranteed to have the well-studied properties of reduced models known from model reduction, without requiring full knowledge of the governing equations and without requiring the operators of the high-dimensional systems. The key ingredient is a new data sampling scheme to obtain re-projected trajectories of high-dimensional systems that correspond to Markovian dynamics in low-dimensional subspaces. The exact recovery of reduced models from these re-projected trajectories is guaranteed pre-asymptotically under certain conditions for finite amounts of data and for a large class of systems with polynomial nonlinear terms. Numerical results demonstrate that the low-dimensional models learned with the proposed approach match reduced models from traditional model reduction up to numerical errors in practice. In conclusion, the numerical results further indicate that low-dimensional models fitted to re-projected trajectories are predictive even in situations where models fitted to trajectories without re-projection are inaccurate and unstable.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Operator inference for non-intrusive model reduction of systems with non-polynomial nonlinear terms

Here in this work we present a non-intrusive model reduction method to learn low-dimensional models of dynamical systems with non-polynomial nonlinear terms that are spatially local and that are given in analytic form. In contrast to state-of-the-art model reduction methods that are intrusive and thus require full knowledge of the governing equations and the operators of a full model of the discretized dynamical system, the proposed approach requires only the non-polynomial terms in analytic form and learns the rest of the dynamics from snapshots computed with a potentially black-box full-model solver. The proposed method learns operators for the linear and polynomially nonlinear dynamics via a least-squares problem, where the given non-polynomial terms are incorporated on the right-hand side. The least-squares problem is linear and thus can be solved efficiently in practice. The proposed method is demonstrated on three problems governed by partial differential equations, namely the diffusion–reaction Chafee–Infante model, a tubular reactor model for reactive flows, and a batch-chromatography model that describes a chemical separation process. The numerical results provide evidence that the proposed approach learns reduced models that achieve comparable accuracy as models constructed with state-of-the-art intrusive model reduction methods that require full knowledge of the governing equations.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Lift & Learn: Physics-informed machine learning for large-scale nonlinear dynamical systems

In this work, we present Lift & Learn, a physics-informed method for learning low-dimensional models for large-scale dynamical systems. The method exploits knowledge of a system’s governing equations to identify a coordinate transformation in which the system dynamics have quadratic structure. This transformation is called a lifting map because it often adds auxiliary variables to the system state. The lifting map is applied to data obtained by evaluating a model for the original nonlinear system. This lifted data is projected onto its leading principal components, and low-dimensional linear and quadratic matrix operators are fit to the lifted reduced data using a least-squares operator inference procedure. Analysis of our method shows that the Lift & Learn models are able to capture the system physics in the lifted coordinates at least as accurately as traditional intrusive model reduction approaches. This preservation of system physics makes the Lift & Learn models robust to changes in inputs. Numerical experiments on the FitzHugh–Nagumo neuron activation model and the compressible Euler equations demonstrate the generalizability of our model.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗