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This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to identify partial differential equation (PDE) parameters of a dynamical system. Specifically, we adopt a mathematical "transport" model for the solution of the dynamical system at specific spatial locations that allows us to accurately estimate the model parameters, including those associated with structural damage. This is accomplished by means of a newly-developed mathematical transform, the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), which is shown to convert the general nonlinear parameter estimation problem into a simple linear regression. This approach has the additional practical advantage of requiring no a priori knowledge of the source of the excitation (or, alternatively, the initial conditions). By using training data, we devise a coarse regression procedure to recover different PDE parameters from the PDE solution measured at a single location. Numerical experiments show that the proposed regression procedure is capable of detecting and estimating PDE parameters with superior accuracy compared to a number of recently developed machine learning methods. Furthermore, a damage identification experiment conducted on a publicly available dataset provides strong evidence of the proposed method's effectiveness in structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. The Python implementation of the proposed system identification technique is integrated as a part of the software package PyTransKit (https://github.com/rohdelab/PyTransKit).

We present a new supervised image classification method applicable to a broad class of image deformation models. The method makes use of the previously described Radon Cumulative Distribution Transform (R-CDT) for image data, whose mathematical properties are exploited to express the image data in a form that is more suitable for machine learning. While certain operations such as translation, scaling, and higher-order transformations are challenging to model in native image space, we show the R-CDT can capture some of these variations and thus render the associated image classification problems easier to solve. The method -- utilizing a nearest-subspace algorithm in R-CDT space -- is simple to implement, non-iterative, has no hyper-parameters to tune, is computationally efficient, label efficient, and provides competitive accuracies to state-of-the-art neural networks for many types of classification problems. In addition to the test accuracy performances, we show improvements (with respect to neural network-based methods) in terms of computational efficiency (it can be implemented without the use of GPUs), number of training samples needed for training, as well as out-of-distribution generalization. The Python code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/rohdelab/rcdt_ns_classifier., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures

We describe a new model for image propagation through open air in the presence of changes in the index of refraction (e.g. due to turbulence) using the theory of optimal transport. We describe the relationship between photon density, or image intensity, and the phase of the traveling wave and, together with a least action principle, suggest a method for approximately recovering the solution of the photon flow. By linking atmospheric propagation solutions to optimal transport, we provide a physics-based (as opposed to phenomenological) model for predicting turbulence-induced changes to sequences of images. Simulated and real data are utilized to validate and compare the model to other existing methods typically used to model this type of data. Given its superior performance in describing experimental data, the new model suggests new algorithms for a variety of atmospheric imaging applications.

The theory behind compressive sampling pre-supposes that a given sequence of observations may be exactly represented by a linear combination of a small number of basis vectors. In practice, however, even small deviations from an exact signal model can result in dramatic increases in estimation error; this is the so-called "basis mismatch" problem. This work provides one possible solution to this problem in the form of an iterative, biconvex search algorithm. The approach uses standard $\ell_1$-minimization to find the signal model coefficients followed by a maximum likelihood estimate of the signal model. The algorithm is illustrated on harmonic signals of varying sparsity and outperforms the current state-of-the-art., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures, IEEE Signal Processing Letters (Aug. 2014), in press