In this paper, we establish a connection between the recently developed data-driven timefrequency
analysis [10, 11] and the classical second order differential equations. The main idea
of the data-driven time-frequency analysis is to decompose a multiscale signal into the sparsest
collection of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) over the largest possible dictionary via nonlinear
optimization. These IMFs are of the form a(t) cos(θ(t)) where the amplitude a(t) is positive
and slowly varying. The non-decreasing phase function θ(t) is determined by the data and in
general depends on the signal in a nonlinear fashion. One of the main results of this paper
is that we show that each IMF can be associated with a solution of a second order ordinary
differential equation of the form x¨ + p(x, t)x˙ + q(x, t) = 0. Further, we propose a localized
variational formulation for this problem and develop an effective l1-based optimization method
to recover p(x, t) and q(x, t) by looking for a sparse representation of p and q in terms of the
polynomial basis. Depending on the form of nonlinearity in p(x, t) and q(x, t), we can define the
order of nonlinearity for the associated IMF. This generalizes a concept recently introduced by
Prof. N. E. Huang et al. [15]. Numerical examples will be provided to illustrate the robustness
and stability of the proposed method for data with or without noise. This manuscript should
be considered as a proof of concept.