In this paper, we introduce a new adaptive data analysis method to study trend and instantaneous frequency of nonlinear and nonstationary data. This method is inspired by the Empirical Mode Decomposition method (EMD) and the recently developed compressed (compressive) sensing theory. The main idea is to look for the sparsest representation of multiscale data within the largest possible dictionary consisting of intrinsic mode functions of the form {a(t) cos(θ(t))}, where a ∈ V (θ), V (θ) consists of the functions smoother than cos(θ(t)) and θ   0. This problem can be formulated as a nonlinear l0 optimization problem. In order to solve this optimization problem, we propose a nonlinear matching pursuit method by generalizing the classical matching pursuit for the l0 optimization problem. One important advantage of this nonlinear matching pursuit method is it can be implemented very efficiently and is very stable to noise. Further, we provide an error analysis of our nonlinear matching pursuit method under certain scale separation assumptions. Extensive numerical examples will be given to demonstrate the robustness of our method and comparison will be made with the state-of-the-art methods. We also apply our method to study data without scale separation, and data with incomplete or under-sampled data.

We propose a multiscale model reduction method for partial differential equations. The main purpose of this method is to derive an effective equation for multiscale problems without scale separation. An essential ingredient of our method is to decompose the harmonic coordinates into a smooth part and a highly oscillatory part so that the smooth part is invertible and the highly oscillatory part is small. Such a decomposition plays a key role in our construction of the effective equation. We show that the solution to the effective equation is in H2, and can be approximated by a regular coarse mesh. When the multiscale problem has scale separation and a periodic structure, our method recovers the traditional homogenized equation. Furthermore, we provide error analysis for our method and show that the solution to the effective equation is close to the original multiscale solution in the H1 norm. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed method for several multiscale problems without scale separation, including a problem with a high contrast coefficient.

Adaptive data analysis provides an important tool in extracting hidden physical information from multiscale data that arise from various applications. In this paper, we review two data-driven time-frequency analysis methods that we introduced recently to study trend and instantaneous frequency of nonlinear and nonstationary data. These methods are inspired by the empirical mode decomposition method (EMD) and the recently developed compressed (compressive) sensing theory. The main idea is to look for the sparsest representation of multiscale data within the largest possible dictionary consisting of intrinsic mode functions of the form {a(t) cos((t))}, where a is assumed to be less oscillatory than cos((t)) and ′ > 0. This problem can be formulated as a nonlinear l0 optimization problem. We have proposed two methods to solve this nonlinear optimization problem. The first one is based on nonlinear basis pursuit and the second one is based on nonlinear matching pursuit. Convergence analysis has been carried out for the nonlinear matching pursuit method. Some numerical experiments are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

In a recent paper [11], Hou and Shi introduced a new adaptive data analysis method to analyze nonlinear and non-stationary data.The main idea is to look for the sparsest representation of multiscale data within the largest possible dictionary consisting of intrinsic mode functions of the form{a(t)cos(θ(t))}, where a∈V(θ), V(θ) consists of the functions that are less oscillatory than cos(θ(t))and θ0. This problem was formulated as a nonlinear L0 optimization problem and an iterative nonlinear matching pursuit method was proposed to solve this nonlinear optimization problem. In this paper, we prove the convergence of this nonlinear matching pursuit method under some scale separation assumptions on the signal. We consider both well- resolved and poorly sample dsignals, as well as signals with noise. In the case without noise, we prove that our method gives exact recovery of the original signal.

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.