An information-geometric approach to feature extraction and moment reconstruction in dynamical systems

We propose a dimension reduction framework for feature extraction and moment reconstruction in dynamical systems that operates on spaces of probability measures induced by observables of the system rather than directly in the original data space of the observables themselves as in more conventional methods. Our approach is based on the fact that orbits of a dynamical system induce probability measures over the measurable space defined by (partial) observations of the system. We equip the space of these probability measures with a divergence, i.e., a distance between probability distributions, and use this divergence to define a kernel integral operator. The eigenfunctions of this operator create an orthonormal basis of functions that capture different timescales of the dynamical system. One of our main results shows that the evolution of the moments of the dynamics-dependent probability measures can be related to a time-averaging operator on the original dynamical system. Using this result, we show that the moments can be expanded in the eigenfunction basis, thus opening up the avenue for nonparametric forecasting of the moments. If the collection of probability measures is itself a manifold, we can in addition equip the statistical manifold with the Riemannian metric and use techniques from information geometry. We present applications to ergodic dynamical systems on the 2-torus and the Lorenz 63 system, and show on a real-world example that a small number of eigenvectors is sufficient to reconstruct the moments (here the first four moments) of an atmospheric time series, i.e., the realtime multivariate Madden-Julian oscillation index.