Learning Theory for Inferring Interaction Kernels in Second-Order Interacting Agent Systems

Modeling the complex interactions of systems of particles or agents is a fundamental problem across the sciences, from physics and biology, to economics and social sciences. In this work, we consider second-order, heterogeneous, multivariable models of interacting agents or particles, within simple environments. We describe a nonparametric inference framework to efficiently estimate the latent interaction kernels which drive these dynamical systems. We develop a learning theory which establishes strong consistency and optimal nonparametric min–max rates of convergence for the estimators, as well as provably accurate predicted trajectories. The optimal rates only depends on intrinsic dimension of interactions, which is typically much smaller than the ambient dimension. Our arguments are based on a coercivity condition which ensures that the interaction kernels can be estimated in stable fashion. The numerical algorithm presented to build the estimators is parallelizable, performs well on high-dimensional problems, and its performance is tested on a variety of complex dynamical systems.