Score the Algebra, Not the Span: Dimension Reduction for Transfer Operator Models of Dynamical Systems

Dimension reduction for dynamical systems is standard practice, and the standard route is spectral: model the transfer (Koopman) operator by its leading modes. We show that on systems assembled from several weakly interacting components --- a structure common in physical and biological settings --- this may either require an exponential number of modes, or drop an entire component: the component is absent from the model rather than modeled coarsely, and no function of it can be predicted at any accuracy. We call this linear masking. The cause is that a rank-based model pays one coordinate per mode. We propose to score instead the σ-algebra the coordinates generate, so that products and powers come free and a component's cost is governed only by its generators rather than by all its interactions. The criterion is a chi2-divergence between the embedded present and future, and it carries a budget guarantee: twice the intrinsic dimension of the dynamics is enough coordinates for an embedding whose algebra carries the operator's entire spectrum, with its full infinite rank. In variational form the criterion admits off-the-shelf estimators, and restricting its critic to the bilinear class returns the VAMP score on the span, so rank-based methods are one end of the same family. We demonstrate the proposed objective on a composite of published benchmark systems. We exhibit examples where the rank-based methods completely miss the masked components at all ranks k<100, while ten algebra coordinates recover all of them. In addition, the resulting algebra representation supports predicting the masked components from few labels, while direct regression from the high-dimensional observation or from the VAMP features fail.