Discover an accurate approximation of dynamical system without prior information and customized design

Abstract Modeling dynamical systems is fraught with challenges when data can be collected but thorough analysis of the mechanism is absent. We design a method to discover unknown dynamical systems from data. The method discovers an accurate approximation of the model without the prior information and the customized design for each problem. The identification steps are straightforward as bringing in the data and then obtaining the model. The method begins with the simple idea that the equations of motion of many practical problems are Riemann integrable functions. For this reason, the Fourier series can decompose the equations of motion. In order to improve the accuracy, we design an extension that helps us to approximate unknown functions by the Fourier series with a high rate of convergence. The idea converts the difficulty of modeling the dynamical system into finding its Fourier series approximation. Convenient procedures enable the modeling of different problems. Numerical examples show that the new method discovers linear and nonlinear dynamical systems in the same steps and without the prior information.