Reactive SINDy: Discovering governing reactions from concentration data

The inner workings of a biological cell or a chemical reactor can be rationalized by the network of reactions, whose structure reveals the most important functional mechanisms. For complex systems, these reaction networks are not known and cannot be efficiently computed with methods; therefore, an important goal is to estimate effective reaction networks from observations, such as time series of the main species. Reaction networks estimated with standard machine learning techniques such as least-squares regression may fit the observations but will typically contain spurious reactions. Here we extend the sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) method to vector-valued ansatz functions, each describing a particular reaction process. The resulting sparse tensor regression method "reactive SINDy" is able to estimate a parsimonious reaction network. We illustrate that a gene regulation network can be correctly estimated from observed time series.