Weak-Form Recovery of Stochastic Generators

Abstract

Data-driven discovery of governing equations is well developed for deterministic systems but much less so for stochastic ones. We present a sparse-symbolic algorithm that recovers both the drift $b(x)$ and the diffusion $a(x)$ of a stochastic differential equation from a single discretely sampled trajectory. It replaces the time-indexed test functions of weak-form SINDy with state-dependent spatial kernels. Fixed-width time-window weighting induces a persistent endogeneity bias: for the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process it erases the drift coefficient entirely, whatever the window shape. Spatial kernels avoid this through a martingale strong-law argument, linked to the estimating-function theory of Bibby and Sorensen. We prove consistency of the drift and diffusion estimators for the Euler-Maruyama coefficients, a $T^{-1/2}$ central limit theorem for the drift, a finite-step correction that links drift and diffusion estimation, and a correction for additive Gaussian observation noise. The theorems assume ergodicity of the Euler-Maruyama chain, which holds for the OU and multiplicative systems but not for the cubic double well, so the double-well results are empirical. The method is validated on three benchmark SDEs (Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, a double well, and multiplicative diffusion), on eight further systems identified from single trajectories with elastic-net-stabilized sparse regression, and in a support-recovery experiment. Exact support recovery from one trajectory needs a long record (about $T\gtrsim 200$ on the double well) and is not guaranteed for shorter records or weakly identified systems.

arXiv comment39 pages, 11 figures and 5 tables