Information Criteria Fail for Dynamical Systems: Sampling Rate and Dimension Dependence

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Utkarsh, Kumar, Abrams, Daniel M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Utkarsh, Kumar
Abrams, Daniel M.
author_facet Utkarsh, Kumar
Abrams, Daniel M.
contents Information criteria such as Akaike's (AIC) and Bayes' (BIC) are widely used for model selection in physics and beyond, quantifying the tradeoff between model complexity and goodness-of-fit to enforce parsimony. However, their derivation assumes uncorrelated samples, an assumption systematically violated by dynamical systems data. Here, through analysis of simple but representative dynamical models -- exponential decay, harmonic oscillation, and chaos -- we demonstrate that model selection depends sensitively on sampling rate and system dimensionality. We derive explicit formulas predicting when standard information criteria fail that should be adaptable to many real-world scenarios, enabling experimentalists to design sampling protocols that avoid pathological regimes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14931
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Criteria Fail for Dynamical Systems: Sampling Rate and Dimension Dependence
Utkarsh, Kumar
Abrams, Daniel M.
Dynamical Systems
Mathematical Physics
Information criteria such as Akaike's (AIC) and Bayes' (BIC) are widely used for model selection in physics and beyond, quantifying the tradeoff between model complexity and goodness-of-fit to enforce parsimony. However, their derivation assumes uncorrelated samples, an assumption systematically violated by dynamical systems data. Here, through analysis of simple but representative dynamical models -- exponential decay, harmonic oscillation, and chaos -- we demonstrate that model selection depends sensitively on sampling rate and system dimensionality. We derive explicit formulas predicting when standard information criteria fail that should be adaptable to many real-world scenarios, enabling experimentalists to design sampling protocols that avoid pathological regimes.
title Information Criteria Fail for Dynamical Systems: Sampling Rate and Dimension Dependence
topic Dynamical Systems
Mathematical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14931