Predicting rare events using neural networks and short-trajectory data

John Strahan, Justin Finkel, Aaron R. Dinner, Jonathan Weare

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Estimating the likelihood, timing, and nature of events is a major goal of modeling stochastic dynamical systems. When the event is rare in comparison with the timescales of simulation and/or measurement needed to resolve the elemental dynamics, accurate prediction from direct observations becomes challenging. In such cases a more effective approach is to cast statistics of interest as solutions to Feynman-Kac equations (partial differential equations). Here, we develop an approach to solve Feynman-Kac equations by training neural networks on short-trajectory data. Our approach is based on a Markov approximation but otherwise avoids assumptions about the underlying model and dynamics. This makes it applicable to treating complex computational models and observational data. We illustrate the advantages of our method using a low-dimensional model that facilitates visualization, and this analysis motivates an adaptive sampling strategy that allows on-the-fly identification of and addition of data to regions important for predicting the statistics of interest. Finally, we demonstrate that we can compute accurate statistics for a 75-dimensional model of sudden stratospheric warming. This system provides a stringent test bed for our method.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number112152
JournalJournal of Computational Physics
Volume488
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 2023

Keywords

  • Adaptive sampling
  • Feynman-Kac equation
  • High-dimensional PDE
  • Holton-Mass model
  • Neural network
  • Rare event

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Numerical Analysis
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)
  • General Physics and Astronomy
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computational Mathematics
  • Applied Mathematics

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