Structure-selection techniques applied to continuous-time nonlinear models

This paper addresses the problem of choosing the multinomials that should compose a polynomial mathematical model starting from data. The mathematical representation used is a nonlinear differential equation of the polynomial type. Some approaches that have been used in the context of discrete-time models are adapted and applied to continuous-time models. Two examples are included to illustrate the main ideas. Models obtained with and without structure selection are compared using topological analysis. The main differences between structure-selected models and complete structure models are: (i) the former are more parsimonious than the latter, (ii) a predefined fixed-point configuration can be guaranteed for the former, and (iii) the former set of models produce attractors that are topologically closer to the original attractor than those produced by the complete structure models. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.