skip to main content


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Balzano, Laura"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. We present a novel method for learning reduced-order models of dynamical systems using nonlinear manifolds. First, we learn the manifold by identifying nonlinear structure in the data through a general representation learning problem. The proposed approach is driven by embeddings of low-order polynomial form. A projection onto the nonlinear manifold reveals the algebraic structure of the reduced-space system that governs the problem of interest. The matrix operators of the reduced-order model are then inferred from the data using operator inference. Numerical experiments on a number of nonlinear problems demonstrate the generalizability of the methodology and the increase in accuracy that can be obtained over reduced-order modeling methods that employ a linear subspace approximation.

     
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 1, 2025
  2. We present a novel framework for learning cost-efficient latent representations in problems with highdimensional state spaces through nonlinear dimension reduction. By enriching linear state approximations with low-order polynomial terms we account for key nonlinear interactions existing in the data thereby reducing the problem’s intrinsic dimensionality. Two methods are introduced for learning the representation of such low-dimensional, polynomial manifolds for embedding the data. The manifold parametrization coefficients can be obtained by regression via either a proper orthogonal decomposition or an alternating minimization based approach. Our numerical results focus on the one-dimensional Korteweg-de Vries equation where accounting for nonlinear correlations in the data was found to lower the representation error by up to two orders of magnitude compared to linear dimension reduction techniques. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available December 13, 2024
  3. An extensively studied phenomenon of the past few years in training deep networks is the implicit bias of gradient descent towards parsimonious solutions. In this work, we further investigate this phenomenon by narrowing our focus to deep matrix factorization, where we reveal surprising low-dimensional structures in the learning dynamics when the target matrix is low-rank. Specifically, we show that the evolution of gradient descent starting from arbitrary orthogonal initialization only affects a minimal portion of singular vector spaces across all weight matrices. In other words, the learning process happens only within a small invariant subspace of each weight matrix, despite the fact that all parameters are updated throughout training. From this, we provide rigorous justification for low-rank training in a specific, yet practical setting. In particular, we demonstrate that we can construct compressed factorizations that are equivalent to full-width, deep factorizations throughout training for solving low-rank matrix completion problems efficiently. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available November 6, 2024
  4. Principal component analysis (PCA) is a key tool in the field of data dimensionality reduction that is useful for various data science problems. However, many applications involve heterogeneous data that varies in quality due to noise characteristics associated with different sources of the data. Methods that deal with this mixed dataset are known as heteroscedastic methods. Current methods like HePPCAT make Gaussian assumptions of the basis coefficients that may not hold in practice. Other methods such as Weighted PCA (WPCA) assume the noise variances are known, which may be difficult to know in practice. This paper develops a PCA method that can estimate the sample-wise noise variances and use this information in the model to improve the estimate of the subspace basis associated with the low-rank structure of the data. This is done without distributional assumptions of the low-rank component and without assuming the noise variances are known. Simulations show the effectiveness of accounting for such heteroscedasticity in the data, the benefits of using such a method with all of the data versus retaining only good data, and comparisons are made against other PCA methods established in the literature like PCA, Robust PCA (RPCA), and HePPCAT. Code available at https://github.com/javiersc1/ALPCAH. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 10, 2024
  5. While Markov jump systems (MJSs) are more appropriate than LTI systems in terms of modeling abruptly changing dynamics, MJSs (and other switched systems) may suffer from the model complexity brought by the potentially sheer number of switching modes. Much of the existing work on reducing switched systems focuses on the state space where techniques such as discretization and dimension reduction are performed, yet reducing mode complexity receives few attention. In this work, inspired by clustering techniques from unsupervised learning, we propose a reduction method for MJS such that a mode-reduced MJS can be constructed with guaranteed approximation performance. Furthermore, we show how this reduced MJS can be used in designing controllers for the original MJS to reduce the computation cost while maintaining guaranteed suboptimality. 
    more » « less
  6. While Markov jump systems (MJSs) are more appropriate than LTI systems in terms of modeling abruptly changing dynamics, MJSs (and other switched systems) may suffer from the model complexity brought by the potentially sheer number of switching modes. Much of the existing work on reducing switched systems focuses on the state space where techniques such as discretization and dimension reduction are performed, yet reducing mode complexity receives few attention. In this work, inspired by clustering techniques from unsupervised learning, we propose a reduction method for MJS such that a mode-reduced MJS can be constructed with guaranteed approximation performance. Furthermore, we show how this reduced MJS can be used in designing controllers for the original MJS to reduce the computation cost while maintaining guaranteed suboptimality. Keywords: Markov Jump Systems, System Reduction, Clustering 
    more » « less