Propagating uncertainty through system dynamics in reproducing kernel Hilbert space

Abstract

We present a data-driven approach to propagate uncertainty in initial conditions through the dynamics of an unknown system in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). The uncertainty in initial conditions is represented through its kernel mean embedding (KME) in the RKHS. For a discrete-time Markovian dynamical system, we utilize the conditional mean embedding (CME) operator to encode the underlying dynamics. Learning in RKHS often incurs prohibitive data storage requirements. To circumvent said limitation, we propose an algorithm to propagate uncertainty via a learned sparse CME operator, and provide theoretical guarantees on the approximation error for the embedded distribution with time. We empirically study our algorithm over illustrative dynamical systems and power systems.