Optimal Transport for Parameter Identification of Chaotic Dynamics via Invariant Measures

We study an optimal transportation approach for recovering parameters in dynamical systems with a single smoothly varying attractor. We assume that the data is not sufficient for estimating time derivatives of state variables but enough to approximate the long-time behavior of the system through an approximation of its physical measure. Thus, we fit physical measures by taking the Wasserstein distance from optimal transportation as a misfit function between two probability distributions. In particular, we analyze the regularity of the resulting loss function for general transportation costs and derive gradient formulas. Physical measures are approximated as fixed points of suitable PDE-based Perron--Frobenius operators. Test cases discussed in the paper include common low-dimensional dynamical systems.