We formulate a data-driven method for constructing finite volume discretizations of a dynamical system's underlying Continuity / Fokker-Planck equation. A method is employed that allows for flexibility in partitioning state space, generalizes to function spaces, applies to arbitrarily long sequences of time-series data, is robust to noise, and quantifies uncertainty with respect to finite sample effects. After applying the method, one is left with Markov states (cell centers) and a random matrix approximation to the generator. When used in tandem, they emulate the statistics of the underlying system. We apply the method to the Lorenz equations (a three-dimensional ordinary differential equation) and a modified Held-Suarez atmospheric simulation (a 1,000,000+ degree of freedom Flux-Differencing Discontinuous Galerkin discretization of the compressible Euler equations with gravity and rotation on a thin spherical shell). We show that a coarse discretization captures many essential statistical properties of the system, such as steady state moments, time autocorrelations, and residency times for subsets of state space.

[Contact: D. Viswanath]