On the role of nonlinear correlations in reduced-order modeling*

A major goal for reduced-order models of unsteady fluid flows is to uncover and exploit latent low-dimensional structure. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) provides an energy-optimal linear basis to represent the flow kinematics, but converges slowly for advection-dominated flows and tends to overestimate the number of dynamically relevant variables. We show that nonlinear correlations in the temporal POD coefficients can be exploited to identify the underlying attractor, characterized by a minimal set of driving modes and a manifold equation for the remaining modes. By viewing these nonlinear correlations as an invariant manifold reduction, this least-order representation can be used to stabilize POD-Galerkin models or as a state space for data-driven model identification. In the latter case, we use sparse polynomial regression to learn a compact, interpretable dynamical system model from the time series of the active modal coefficients. We demonstrate this perspective on a quasiperiodic shear-driven cavity flow and show that the dynamics evolve on a torus generated by two independent Stuart-Landau oscillators. These results emphasize the importance of nonlinear dimensionality reduction to reveal underlying structure in complex flows.