Numerical Spectrum Linking: Identification of Governing PDE via Koopman-Chebyshev Approximation with Resampling

Abstract

A numerical framework is proposed for identifying governing partial differential equations (PDEs) from observational data by establishing a link between observation-driven and equation-driven Koopman operators in a common Chebyshev spectral domain. In contrast to data-driven approaches such as dynamic mode decomposition (DMD), which approximate Koopman operators without explicitly relating them to differential operators, the proposed framework constructs finite-dimensional Koopman operators using Chebyshev spectral representations, thereby enabling direct comparison between data-derived dynamics and candidate governing PDEs. A unified observation model together with a least-squares coefficient recovery formulation is introduced to recover Chebyshev spectral coefficients from observations obtained on arbitrary sampling grids. This provides a numerically consistent interface between practical observations and Chebyshev-based Koopman analysis. Numerical experiments under direct Chebyshev, uniform, and irregular sampling configurations demonstrate that the proposed framework accurately identifies the governing PDE from observations. An observation-density study shows that reliable PDE identification is consistently achieved once sufficient independent observations are available for stable coefficient recovery, providing a practical guideline.