Combining data assimilation and machine learning to build data-driven models for unknown long time dynamics—Applications in cardiovascular modeling

We propose a method to discover differential equations describing the long-term dynamics of phenomena featuring a multiscale behavior in time, starting from measurements taken at the fast-scale. Our methodology is based on a synergetic combination of data assimilation (DA), used to estimate the parameters associated with the known fast-scale dynamics, and machine learning (ML), used to infer the laws underlying the slow-scale dynamics. Specifically, by exploiting the scale separation between the fast and the slow dynamics, we propose a decoupling of time scales that allows to drastically lower the computational burden. Then, we propose a ML algorithm that learns a parametric mathematical model from a collection of time series coming from the phenomenon to be modeled. Moreover, we study the interpretability of the data-driven models obtained within the black-box learning framework proposed in this paper. In particular, we show that every model can be rewritten in infinitely many different equivalent ways, thus making intrinsically ill-posed the problem of learning a parametric differential equation starting from time series. Hence, we propose a strategy that allows to select a unique representative model in each equivalence class, thus enhancing the interpretability of the results. We demonstrate the effectiveness and noise-robustness of the proposed methods through several test cases, in which we reconstruct several differential models starting from time series generated through the models themselves. Finally, we show the results obtained for a test case in the cardiovascular modeling context, which sheds light on a promising field of application of the proposed methods.