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Conditional mixing in deterministic chaos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2023

CAROLINE L. WORMELL*
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Probabilités, Statistique et Modélisation, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Paris, France (e-mail: caroline.wormell@anu.edu.au)
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Abstract

While on the one hand, chaotic dynamical systems can be predicted for all time given exact knowledge of an initial state, they are also in many cases rapidly mixing, meaning that smooth probabilistic information (quantified by measures) on the system’s state has negligible value for predicting the long-term future. However, an understanding of the long-term predictive value of intermediate kinds of probabilistic information is necessary in various physical problems, and largely remains lacking. Of particular interest in data assimilation and linear response theory are the conditional measures of the Sinai–Ruelle–Bowen (SRB) measure on zero sets of general smooth functions of the phase space. In this paper we give rigorous and numerical evidence that such measures generically converge back under the dynamics to the full SRB measures, exponentially quickly. We call this property conditional mixing. While conditional mixing typically cannot be proven from standard transfer operator theory, we will prove that conditional mixing holds in a class of generalized baker’s maps, and demonstrate it numerically in some non-Markovian piecewise hyperbolic maps. Conditional mixing provides a natural limit on the effectiveness of long-term forecasting of chaotic systems via partial observations, and appears key to proving the existence of linear response outside the setting of smooth uniform hyperbolicity.

Information

Type
Original Article
Copyright
© Australian National University, 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1 Left: picture of the Lozi attractor at $a=1.7, b=0.5$ (black), the singular line $\{x = 0\}$ (purple line), their intersection (pink Cantor set). Right: histogram of $\rho (y\mid 0)$, obtained from $200,\!000$ iterates of the unstable manifold dynamics $\vec {f}$, binned at width $0.0025$.

Figure 1

Figure 2 Exponentially fast filling of the Lozi attractor $\Lambda \subset \mathbb {R}^2$ (black) by the set intersection $\Lambda \cap \{x = 0\}$ (pink), pushed forward n times by the same Lozi map. The level set $\{x = 0\}$ is given in purple. Lozi parameters $a = 1.8$, $b = 0.35$ are used.

Figure 2

Figure 3 Posterior distribution (pink) after one observation step of $H(u,v) = u + \zeta $ where $\zeta \sim \mathcal {N}(0,\sigma ^2)$, for varying values of $\sigma $. Line corresponding to $H(x,y) = H_{\mathrm {obs}}$ in purple, attractor in black. Convergence to the conditional measure as in Figure 1 can be seen as the noise $\sigma \to 0$.

Figure 3

Figure 4 Decay of mean forecasts of $A(x,y) = 2x$ to SRB measure averages for Bayesian filters with various levels of observation noise. The observation function used was $H(x,y) = x$.

Figure 4

Figure 5 Picture of a baker’s map of the form (6) showing the attractor (black), an intersecting line $x = \psi (y)-t_0$, a leaf of a transverse foliation of the form in Proposition 4.1, (purple), and the action of the map on pieces of the domain (in pale colours), and on the conditional measure of the SRB measure on the intersecting line (pink).

Figure 5

Figure 6 Picture showing the attractor $[0,1]\times C_{1/3}$ of the piecewise linear baker’s map $b_{\mathrm {bad}}$ (black) with the images of its pieces (pale colours), and the linear level set $x-y=0$ (purple). The conditional measure of the SRB measure on the intersecting line is shown in pink dots, and, in pale vertical pink lines, the $b_{\mathrm {bad}}$-invariant subset $C_{1/3} \times [0,1]$ in which the support of the conditional measure is contained.

Figure 6

Figure 7 In orange and blue, for the parameters of the Lozi map $a = 1.8$ and $b = 0.35$, $|\rho _{\mathcal {S}}(A \circ f^n) - \rho _{\mathcal {S}}(1) \rho (A)|$ is plotted for varying n and two different observables A, where $\rho _{\mathcal {S}} = \rho (\cdot \mid 0)$. The measure was sampled using $100$ time series of $10^7$ iterates of the segment dynamics $\vec f$, implemented in high-precision (196-bit) validated interval arithmetic. Details of the algorithm are given in Appendix A. Two forms of error are plotted: with error bars, 99% confidence intervals for the sampling error, and with block error (not visible), the error arising from the interval arithmetic. In grey, decay of autocorrelations for a smooth observable $A(x) = 2x$ against the SRB measure, using $100$ time series of $10^8$ iterates of the full dynamics f.