Data-Driven Stability Analysis of a Chaotic Time-Delayed System

Systems with time-delayed chaotic dynamics are common in nature, from control theory to aeronautical propulsion. The overarching objective of this paper is to compute the stability properties of a chaotic dynamical system, which is time-delayed. The stability analysis is based only on data. We employ the echo state network (ESN), a type of recurrent neural network, and train it on timeseries of a prototypical time-delayed nonlinear thermoacoustic system. By running the trained ESN autonomously, we show that it can reproduce (i) the long-term statistics of the thermoacoustic system’s variables, (ii) the physical portion of the Lyapunov spectrum, and (iii) the statistics of the finite-time Lyapunov exponents. This work opens up the possibility to infer stability properties of time-delayed systems from experimental observations.