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Analyzing signals arising from dynamical systems typically requires many modeling assumptions. In high dimensions, this modeling is particularly difficult due to the "curse of dimensionality." In this paper, we propose a method for building an intrinsic representation of such signals in a purely data-driven manner. First, we apply a manifold learning technique, diffusion maps, to learn the intrinsic model of the latent variables of the dynamical system, solely from the measurements. Second, we use concepts and tools from control theory and build a linear contracting observer to estimate the latent variables in a sequential manner from new incoming measurements. The effectiveness of the presented framework is demonstrated by applying it to a toy problem and to a music analysis application. In these examples, we show that our method reveals the intrinsic variables of the analyzed dynamical systems.

Analyzing signals arising from dynamical systems typically requires many modeling assumptions. In high dimensions, this modeling is particularly difficult due to the "curse of dimensionality." In this paper, we propose a method for building an intrinsic representation of such signals in a purely data-driven manner. First, we apply a manifold learning technique, diffusion maps, to learn the intrinsic model of the latent variables of the dynamical system, solely from the measurements. Second, we use concepts and tools from control theory and build a linear contracting observer to estimate the latent variables in a sequential manner from new incoming measurements. The effectiveness of the presented framework is demonstrated by applying it to a toy problem and to a music analysis application. In these examples, we show that our method reveals the intrinsic variables of the analyzed dynamical systems.

© 1991-2012 IEEE. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric method for state estimation of high-dimensional nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems, which evolve according to gradient flows with isotropic diffusion. We combine diffusion maps, a manifold learning technique, with a linear Kalman filter and with concepts from Koopman operator theory. More concretely, using diffusion maps, we construct data-driven virtual state coordinates, which linearize the system model. Based on these coordinates, we devise a data-driven framework for state estimation using the Kalman filter. We demonstrate the strengths of our method with respect to both parametric and non-parametric algorithms in three tracking problems. In particular, applying the approach to actual recordings of hippocampal neural activity in rodents directly yields a representation of the position of the animals. We show that the proposed method outperforms competing non-parametric algorithms in the examined stochastic problem formulations. Additionally, we obtain results comparable to classical parametric algorithms, which, in contrast to our method, are equipped with model knowledge.