Mixtures of ensembles: System separation and identification via optimal transport

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Elvander, Filip, Haasler, Isabel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917959187824640
author Elvander, Filip
Haasler, Isabel
author_facet Elvander, Filip
Haasler, Isabel
contents Crowd dynamics and many large biological systems can be described as populations of agents or particles, which can only be observed on aggregate population level. Identifying the dynamics of agents is crucial for understanding these large systems. However, the population of agents is typically not homogeneous, and thus the aggregate observations consist of the superposition of multiple ensembles each governed by individual dynamics. In this work, we propose an optimal transport framework to jointly separate the population into several ensembles and identify each ensemble's dynamical system, based on aggregate observations of the population. We propose a bi-convex optimization problem, which we solve using a block coordinate descent with convergence guarantees. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits close-to-oracle performance also in noisy settings, yielding accurate estimates of both the ensembles and the parameters governing their dynamics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_13362
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mixtures of ensembles: System separation and identification via optimal transport
Elvander, Filip
Haasler, Isabel
Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
Crowd dynamics and many large biological systems can be described as populations of agents or particles, which can only be observed on aggregate population level. Identifying the dynamics of agents is crucial for understanding these large systems. However, the population of agents is typically not homogeneous, and thus the aggregate observations consist of the superposition of multiple ensembles each governed by individual dynamics. In this work, we propose an optimal transport framework to jointly separate the population into several ensembles and identify each ensemble's dynamical system, based on aggregate observations of the population. We propose a bi-convex optimization problem, which we solve using a block coordinate descent with convergence guarantees. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits close-to-oracle performance also in noisy settings, yielding accurate estimates of both the ensembles and the parameters governing their dynamics.
title Mixtures of ensembles: System separation and identification via optimal transport
topic Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13362