Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

The identification of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and dynamical systems is a fundamental problem in control [32, 59, 60], data assimilation [42, 84], and more recently in scientific machine learning (ML) [11, 72, 74]. While algorithms such as Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) and its variants [46] are widely used by practitioners, they often fail in scenarios where observations of the state of the system are scarce, indirect, and noisy. In such scenarios modifications to SINDy-type methods are required to enforce additional constraints on the recovered equations to make them consistent with the observational data. Put simply, traditional SINDy-type methods work in two steps: (1) the data is used to filter the state of the system and estimate the derivatives, and (2) the filtered state is used to learn the underlying dynamics. In the regime of scarce, noisy and incomplete data, step 1 is inaccurate, which can propagate to poor results in the subsequent step 2. In this paper, we propose an all-at-once approach to filtering and equation learning based on collocation in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) which we term Joint SINDy (JSINDy), and shows that the issues above can be mitigated by performing both steps together. This joins a broader class of dynamics-informed methods that integrate the governing equations directly into the learning objective, either as hard constraints or as least-squares relaxations, which couples the problems of state estimation and model discovery. Representative examples include physics-informed and sparse-regression frameworks based on neural networks, splines, kernels, finite differences, and adjoint methods [21, 27, 39, 41, 72, 73, 88].

There are two main classes of approaches to explain the prediction of a model.

We propose a kernel-based nonparametric framework for mean-variance optimization that enables inference on economically motivated shape constraints in finance, including positivity, monotonicity, and convexity. Many central hypotheses in financial econometrics are naturally expressed as shape relations on latent functions (e.g., term premia, CAPM relations, and the pricing kernel), yet enforcing such constraints during estimation can mask economically meaningful violations; our approach therefore separates learning from validation by first estimating an unconstrained solution and then testing shape properties. We establish statistical properties of the regularized sample estimator and derive rigorous guarantees, including asymptotic consistency, a functional central limit theorem, and a finite-sample deviation bound achieving the Monte Carlo rate up to a regularization term. Building on these results, we construct a joint Wald-type statistic to test shape constraints on finite grids. An efficient algorithm based on a pivoted Cholesky factorization yields scalability to large datasets. Numerical studies, including an options-based asset-pricing application, illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method for evaluating monotonicity and convexity restrictions.

The representer theorem is a cornerstone of kernel methods, which aim to estimate latent functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) in a nonparametric manner. Its significance lies in converting inherently infinite-dimensional optimization problems into finite-dimensional ones over dual coefficients, thereby enabling practical and computationally tractable algorithms. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the latent triggering kernels--functions that encode the interaction structure between events--for linear multivariate Hawkes processes based on observed event sequences within an RKHS framework. We show that, under the principle of penalized least squares minimization, a novel form of representer theorem emerges: a family of transformed kernels can be defined via a system of simultaneous integral equations, and the optimal estimator of each triggering kernel is expressed as a linear combination of these transformed kernels evaluated at the data points. Remarkably, the dual coefficients are all analytically fixed to unity, obviating the need to solve a costly optimization problem to obtain the dual coefficients. This leads to a highly efficient estimator capable of handling large-scale data more effectively than conventional nonparametric approaches. Empirical evaluations on synthetic datasets reveal that the proposed method attains competitive predictive accuracy while substantially improving computational efficiency over existing state-of-the-art kernel method-based estimators.