System identification
| Black box systems | |
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| Concepts | |
| Black box · Oracle machine | |
| Methods and techniques | |
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Black-box testing · Blackboxing
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| Related techniques | |
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Feed forward · Obfuscation Pattern recognition · White box System identification |
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| Fundamentals | |
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Control systems · Open systems Operations research Thermodynamic systems |
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The field of system identification uses statistical methods to build mathematical models of dynamical systems from measured data. System identification also includes the design of experiments for efficiently generating informative data for fitting such models as well as model reduction.
A dynamical mathematical model in this context is a mathematical description of the dynamic behavior of a system or process in either the time or frequency domain. Examples include:
One could build a so-called white-box model based on first principles, e.g. a model for a physical process from the Newton equations, but in many cases such models will be overly complex and possibly even impossible to obtain in reasonable time due to the complex nature of many systems and processes.
A much more common approach is therefore to start from measurements of the behavior of the system and the external influences (inputs to the system) and try to determine a mathematical relation between them without going into the details of what is actually happening inside the system. This approach is called system identification. Two types of models are common in the field of system identification:
In the context of nonlinear system identification Jin et al. describe greybox modeling by assuming a model structure a priori and then estimating the model parameters. Parameter estimation is relatively easy if the model form is known but this is rarely the case. Alternatively the structure or model terms for both linear and highly complex nonlinear models can be identified using NARMAX methods. This approach is completely flexible and can be used with grey box models where the algorithms are primed with the known terms, or with completely black box models where the model terms are selected as part of the identification procedure. Another advantage of this approach is that the algorithms will just select linear terms if the system under study is linear, and nonlinear terms if the system is nonlinear, which allows a great deal of flexibility in the identification.
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