Learning Physics Informed Neural ODEs with Partial Measurements

Abstract

Learning dynamics governing physical and spatiotemporal processes is a challenging problem, especially in scenarios where states are partially measured. In this work, we tackle the problem of learning dynamics governing these systems when parts of the system's states are not measured, specifically when the dynamics generating the non-measured states are unknown. Inspired by state estimation theory and Physics Informed Neural ODEs, we present a sequential optimization framework in which dynamics governing unmeasured processes can be learned. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach leveraging both numerical simulations and a real dataset extracted from an electro-mechanical positioning system. We show how the underlying equations fit into our formalism and demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method when compared with standard baselines.