Data-driven discovery of physical laws with human-understandable deep learning
There is an opportunity for deep learning to revolutionize science and
technology by revealing its findings in a human interpretable manner. We
develop a novel data-driven approach for creating a human-machine partnership
to accelerate scientific discovery. By collecting physical system responses,
under carefully selected excitations, we train rational neural networks to
learn Green's functions of hidden partial differential equation. These
solutions reveal human-understandable properties and features, such as linear
conservation laws, and symmetries, along with shock and singularity locations,
boundary effects, and dominant modes. We illustrate this technique on several
examples and capture a range of physics, including advection-diffusion, viscous
shocks, and Stokes flow in a lid-driven cavity.
Authors
Nicolas Boullé, Christopher J. Earls, Alex Townsend