🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses a fundamental challenge in system identification: distinguishing spurious eigenvalues arising from limited data from those genuinely reflecting the underlying system dynamics. To this end, the paper introduces—for the first time—the probabilistic sampling pseudospectrum \( P(\lambda) \) and its computationally efficient estimator \( \hat{P}(\lambda) \). By leveraging resampling and statistical inference, this framework quantifies the uncertainty of eigenvalues across the complex plane. The proposed approach provides a general and rigorous statistical criterion for data-driven methods such as Dynamic Mode Decomposition and subspace identification, substantially enhancing the reliability of identifying true dynamical modes from noisy, finite-length observations.
📝 Abstract
Many complex systems can be reduced to their key components through spectrally decomposing matrices that capture their dynamics. These matrices can in turn be constructed from data, often by least-squares fitting: examples of algorithms to do this include Dynamical Mode Decomposition and variants, subspace identification and eigenvalue realisation algorithms. Typical outputs of these algorithms include a range of isolated, peripheral eigenvalues capturing persistent emergent patterns in the system. However, there is no objective way to assess which of these discrete eigenvalues are artefacts of finite data error, and which are reflections of a fully sampled operator. n this paper, we present a sampling pseudospectrum $P(\lambda)$, that provides probabilistic information on the behaviour of finite-data eigenvalues in the complex plane, and an estimator $\hat P(\lambda)$, which can be obtained by reprocessing our finite data sample. The estimator, which is computationally efficient to implement, allows us to test statistically for the location of the true eigenvalues. This gives us a rigorous and very general way to assess whether the patterns we extract from finite data are likely to be signal or noise.