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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    From Large Deviations to Semidistances of Transport and Mixing: Coherence Analysis for Finite Lagrangian Data
    (New York, NY : Springer, 2018) Koltai, Péter; Renger, D.R. Michiel
    One way to analyze complicated non-autonomous flows is through trying to understand their transport behavior. In a quantitative, set-oriented approach to transport and mixing, finite time coherent sets play an important role. These are time-parametrized families of sets with unlikely transport to and from their surroundings under small or vanishing random perturbations of the dynamics. Here we propose, as a measure of transport and mixing for purely advective (i.e., deterministic) flows, (semi)distances that arise under vanishing perturbations in the sense of large deviations. Analogously, for given finite Lagrangian trajectory data we derive a discrete-time-and-space semidistance that comes from the “best” approximation of the randomly perturbed process conditioned on this limited information of the deterministic flow. It can be computed as shortest path in a graph with time-dependent weights. Furthermore, we argue that coherent sets are regions of maximal farness in terms of transport and mixing, and hence they occur as extremal regions on a spanning structure of the state space under this semidistance—in fact, under any distance measure arising from the physical notion of transport. Based on this notion, we develop a tool to analyze the state space (or the finite trajectory data at hand) and identify coherent regions. We validate our approach on idealized prototypical examples and well-studied standard cases.
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    Extending Transition Path Theory: Periodically Driven and Finite-Time Dynamics
    (New York, NY : Springer, 2020) Helfmann, Luzie; Ribera Borrell, Enric; Schütte, Christof; Koltai, Péter
    Given two distinct subsets A, B in the state space of some dynamical system, transition path theory (TPT) was successfully used to describe the statistical behavior of transitions from A to B in the ergodic limit of the stationary system. We derive generalizations of TPT that remove the requirements of stationarity and of the ergodic limit and provide this powerful tool for the analysis of other dynamical scenarios: periodically forced dynamics and time-dependent finite-time systems. This is partially motivated by studying applications such as climate, ocean, and social dynamics. On simple model examples, we show how the new tools are able to deliver quantitative understanding about the statistical behavior of such systems. We also point out explicit cases where the more general dynamical regimes show different behaviors to their stationary counterparts, linking these tools directly to bifurcations in non-deterministic systems. © 2020, The Author(s).
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    Statistical analysis of tipping pathways in agent-based models
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 2021) Helfmann, Luzie; Heitzig, Jobst; Koltai, Péter; Kurths, Jürgen; Schütte, Christof
    Agent-based models are a natural choice for modeling complex social systems. In such models simple stochastic interaction rules for a large population of individuals on the microscopic scale can lead to emergent dynamics on the macroscopic scale, for instance a sudden shift of majority opinion or behavior. Here we are introducing a methodology for studying noise-induced tipping between relevant subsets of the agent state space representing characteristic configurations. Due to a large number of interacting individuals, agent-based models are high-dimensional, though usually a lower-dimensional structure of the emerging collective behaviour exists. We therefore apply Diffusion Maps, a non-linear dimension reduction technique, to reveal the intrinsic low-dimensional structure. We characterize the tipping behaviour by means of Transition Path Theory, which helps gaining a statistical understanding of the tipping paths such as their distribution, flux and rate. By systematically studying two agent-based models that exhibit a multitude of tipping pathways and cascading effects, we illustrate the practicability of our approach.