Geodesic Density Tracking with Applications to Data Driven Modeling

Many problems in dynamic data driven modeling deals with distributed rather than lumped observations. In this paper, we show that the Monge-Kantorovich optimal transport theory provides a unifying framework to tackle such problems in the systems-control parlance. Specifically, given distributional measurements at arbitrary instances of measurement availability, we show how to derive dynamical systems that interpolate the observed distributions along the geodesics. We demonstrate the framework in the context of three specific problems: (i) finding a feedback control to track observed ensembles over finite-horizon, (ii) finding a model whose prediction matches the observed distributional data, and (iii) refining a baseline model that results a distribution-level prediction-observation mismatch. We emphasize how the three problems can be posed as variants of the optimal transport problem, but lead to different types of numerical methods depending on the problem context. Several examples are given to elucidate the ideas.