Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning

© 2020 authors. Experimental data are often affected by uncontrolled variables that make analysis and interpretation difficult. For spatiotemporal systems, this problem is further exacerbated by their intricate dynamics. Modern machine learning methods are particularly well suited for analyzing and...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lu, Peter Y, Kim, Samuel, Soljačić, Marin, Solijacic, Marin
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society (APS) 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134435.2
_version_ 1811078405988286464
author Lu, Peter Y
Kim, Samuel
Soljačić, Marin
Solijacic, Marin
author2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
author_facet Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Lu, Peter Y
Kim, Samuel
Soljačić, Marin
Solijacic, Marin
author_sort Lu, Peter Y
collection MIT
description © 2020 authors. Experimental data are often affected by uncontrolled variables that make analysis and interpretation difficult. For spatiotemporal systems, this problem is further exacerbated by their intricate dynamics. Modern machine learning methods are particularly well suited for analyzing and modeling complex datasets, but to be effective in science, the result needs to be interpretable. We demonstrate an unsupervised learning technique for extracting interpretable physical parameters from noisy spatiotemporal data and for building a transferable model of the system. In particular, we implement a physics-informed architecture based on variational autoencoders that is designed for analyzing systems governed by partial differential equations. The architecture is trained end to end and extracts latent parameters that parametrize the dynamics of a learned predictive model for the system. To test our method, we train our model on simulated data from a variety of partial differential equations with varying dynamical parameters that act as uncontrolled variables. Numerical experiments show that our method can accurately identify relevant parameters and extract them from raw and even noisy spatiotemporal data (tested with roughly 10% added noise). These extracted parameters correlate well (linearly with R2>0.95) with the ground truth physical parameters used to generate the datasets. We then apply this method to nonlinear fiber propagation data, generated by an ab initio simulation, to demonstrate its capabilities on a more realistic dataset. Our method for discovering interpretable latent parameters in spatiotemporal systems will allow us to better analyze and understand real-world phenomena and datasets, which often have unknown and uncontrolled variables that alter the system dynamics and cause varying behaviors that are difficult to disentangle.
first_indexed 2024-09-23T10:58:59Z
format Article
id mit-1721.1/134435.2
institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology
language English
last_indexed 2024-09-23T10:58:59Z
publishDate 2022
publisher American Physical Society (APS)
record_format dspace
spelling mit-1721.1/134435.22022-06-30T20:34:21Z Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning Lu, Peter Y Kim, Samuel Soljačić, Marin Solijacic, Marin Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science © 2020 authors. Experimental data are often affected by uncontrolled variables that make analysis and interpretation difficult. For spatiotemporal systems, this problem is further exacerbated by their intricate dynamics. Modern machine learning methods are particularly well suited for analyzing and modeling complex datasets, but to be effective in science, the result needs to be interpretable. We demonstrate an unsupervised learning technique for extracting interpretable physical parameters from noisy spatiotemporal data and for building a transferable model of the system. In particular, we implement a physics-informed architecture based on variational autoencoders that is designed for analyzing systems governed by partial differential equations. The architecture is trained end to end and extracts latent parameters that parametrize the dynamics of a learned predictive model for the system. To test our method, we train our model on simulated data from a variety of partial differential equations with varying dynamical parameters that act as uncontrolled variables. Numerical experiments show that our method can accurately identify relevant parameters and extract them from raw and even noisy spatiotemporal data (tested with roughly 10% added noise). These extracted parameters correlate well (linearly with R2>0.95) with the ground truth physical parameters used to generate the datasets. We then apply this method to nonlinear fiber propagation data, generated by an ab initio simulation, to demonstrate its capabilities on a more realistic dataset. Our method for discovering interpretable latent parameters in spatiotemporal systems will allow us to better analyze and understand real-world phenomena and datasets, which often have unknown and uncontrolled variables that alter the system dynamics and cause varying behaviors that are difficult to disentangle. 2022-06-30T20:34:20Z 2021-10-27T20:05:00Z 2022-06-30T20:34:20Z 2020 2021-07-09T12:17:44Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134435.2 en 10.1103/PHYSREVX.10.031056 Physical Review X Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/octet-stream American Physical Society (APS) APS
spellingShingle Lu, Peter Y
Kim, Samuel
Soljačić, Marin
Solijacic, Marin
Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning
title Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning
title_full Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning
title_fullStr Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning
title_full_unstemmed Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning
title_short Extracting Interpretable Physical Parameters from Spatiotemporal Systems Using Unsupervised Learning
title_sort extracting interpretable physical parameters from spatiotemporal systems using unsupervised learning
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134435.2
work_keys_str_mv AT lupetery extractinginterpretablephysicalparametersfromspatiotemporalsystemsusingunsupervisedlearning
AT kimsamuel extractinginterpretablephysicalparametersfromspatiotemporalsystemsusingunsupervisedlearning
AT soljacicmarin extractinginterpretablephysicalparametersfromspatiotemporalsystemsusingunsupervisedlearning
AT solijacicmarin extractinginterpretablephysicalparametersfromspatiotemporalsystemsusingunsupervisedlearning