# SINDy on slow manifolds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00747/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics for model predictive control in the low-data limit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05501/) (2017)
- [Ensemble-SINDy: Robust sparse model discovery in the low-data, high-noise limit, with active learning and control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10992/) (2021)
- [Lift & Learn: Physics-informed machine learning for large-scale nonlinear dynamical systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08177/) (2019)
- [PySINDy: A comprehensive Python package for robust sparse system identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08481/) (2021)
- [Chaos as an interpretable benchmark for forecasting and data-driven modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05266/) (2021)
- [Discovering Governing Equations from Partial Measurements with Deep Delay Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05136/) (2022)
- [Reduced order modeling of parametrized systems through autoencoders and SINDy approach: continuation of periodic solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06786/) (2022)
- [Data-Driven Modeling and Prediction of Non-Linearizable Dynamics via Spectral Submanifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04976/) (2022)
- [Kernel Learning for Robust Dynamic Mode Decomposition: Linear and Nonlinear Disambiguation Optimization (LANDO)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01510/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking sparse system identification with low-dimensional chaos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10787/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) has been established as an effective method to learn interpretable models of dynamical systems from data. However, for high-dimensional slow-fast dynamical systems, the regression problem becomes simultaneously computationally intractable and ill-conditioned. Although, in principle, modeling only the dynamics evolving on the underlying slow manifold addresses both of these challenges, the truncated fast variables have to be compensated by including higher-order nonlinearities as candidate terms for the model, leading to an explosive growth in the size of the SINDy library. In this work, we develop a SINDy variant that is able to robustly and efficiently identify slow-fast dynamics in two steps: (i) identify the slow manifold, that is, an algebraic equation for the fast variables as functions of the slow ones, and (ii) learn a model for the dynamics of the slow variables restricted to the manifold. Critically, the equation learned in (i) is leveraged to build a manifold-informed function library for (ii) that contains only essential higher-order nonlinearites as candidate terms. Rather than containing all monomials of up to a certain degree, the resulting custom library is a sparse subset of the latter that is tailored to the specific problem at hand. The approach is demonstrated on numerical examples of a snap-through buckling beam and the flow over a NACA 0012 airfoil. We find that our method significantly reduces both the condition number and the size of the SINDy library, thus enabling accurate identification of the dynamics on slow manifolds.