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Abstract Harnessing data to discover the underlying governing laws or equations that describe the behavior of complex physical systems can significantly advance our modeling, simulation and understanding of such systems in various science and engineering disciplines. This work introduces a novel approach called physics-informed neural network with sparse regression to discover governing partial differential equations from scarce and noisy data for nonlinear spatiotemporal systems. In particular, this discovery approach seamlessly integrates the strengths of deep neural networks for rich representation learning, physics embedding, automatic differentiation and sparse regression to approximate the solution of system variables, compute essential derivatives, as well as identify the key derivative terms and parameters that form the structure and explicit expression of the equations. The efficacy and robustness of this method are demonstrated, both numerically and experimentally, on discovering a variety of partial differential equation systems with different levels of data scarcity and noise accounting for different initial/boundary conditions. The resulting computational framework shows the potential for closed-form model discovery in practical applications where large and accurate datasets are intractable to capture.
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This content will become publicly available on July 30, 2025
On sparse regression, L p ‐regularization, and automated model discovery
Sparse regression and feature extraction are the cornerstones of knowledge discovery from massive data. Their goal is to discover interpretable and predictive models that provide simple relationships among scientific variables. While the statistical tools for model discovery are well established in the context of linear regression, their generalization to nonlinear regression in material modeling is highly problem‐specific and insufficiently understood. Here we explore the potential of neural networks for automatic model discovery and induce sparsity by a hybrid approach that combines two strategies: regularization and physical constraints. We integrate the concept of Lp regularization for subset selection with constitutive neural networks that leverage our domain knowledge in kinematics and thermodynamics. We train our networks with both, synthetic and real data, and perform several thousand discovery runs to infer common guidelines and trends: L2 regularization or ridge regression is unsuitable for model discovery; L1 regularization or lasso promotes sparsity, but induces strong bias that may aggressively change the results; only L0 regularization allows us to transparently fine‐tune the trade‐off between interpretability and predictability, simplicity and accuracy, and bias and variance. With these insights, we demonstrate that Lp regularized constitutive neural networks can simultaneously discover both, interpretable models and physically meaningful parameters. We anticipate that our findings will generalize to alternative discovery techniques such as sparse and symbolic regression, and to other domains such as biology, chemistry, or medicine. Our ability to automatically discover material models from data could have tremendous applications in generative material design and open new opportunities to manipulate matter, alter properties of existing materials, and discover new materials with user‐defined properties.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2320933
- PAR ID:
- 10512698
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering
- Volume:
- 125
- Issue:
- 14
- ISSN:
- 0029-5981
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e7481
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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