Improved Parameter Estimation from Noisy Time Series for Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a nonlinear dynamical system given a finite time series of observations that are contaminated by observational noise. The least squares method is a standard method for parameter estimation, but for nonlinear dynamical systems it is well known that the least squares method can result in biased estimates, especially when the noise is significant relative to the nonlinearity. In this paper, it is demonstrated that by combining nonlinear noise reduction and least squares parameter fitting it is possible to obtain more accurate parameter estimates.