On uniqueness in structured model learning

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of uniqueness in learning physical laws for systems of partial differential equations (PDEs). Contrary to most existing approaches, it considers a framework of structured model learning, where existing, approximately correct physical models are augmented with components that are learned from data. The main result of the paper is a uniqueness result that covers a large class of PDEs and a suitable class of neural networks used for approximating the unknown model components. The uniqueness result shows that, in the idealized setting of full, noiseless measurements, a unique identification of the unknown model components is possible as regularization-minimizing solution of the PDE system. Furthermore, the paper provides a convergence result showing that model components learned on the basis of incomplete, noisy measurements approximate the regularization-minimizing solution of the PDE system in the limit. These results are possible under specific properties of the approximating neural networks and due to a dedicated choice of regularization. With this, a practical contribution of this analytic paper is to provide a class of model learning frameworks different to standard settings where uniqueness can be expected in the limit of full measurements.