Equation discovery: performing sparse regression (SINDy) on the refined analytical gradients

Discovering nonlinear PDEs with sparse identification of nonlinear dynamical systems (SINDy) is hindered by high dimensionality, noise, and expensive data acquisition. We propose the greedy sampling neural network for sparse identification of nonlinear PDEs (GN-SINDy), a three–stage framework that integrates strategic sampling, differentiable surrogate modelling, and sparse equation discovery. First, a two–way Q-DEIM–based greedy strategy selects maximally informative space–time samples from snapshot data, drastically reducing data requirements. Second, a deep neural network (DNN) is trained as a differentiable surrogate of the solution field, enabling noise–robust analytic derivatives via automatic differentiation. Third, sparse regression with sparsity–promoting estimators [Brunton, S. L., Proctor, J. L., & Kutz, J. N. (2016a). Discovering governing equations from data by sparse identification of nonlinear dynamical systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(15), 3932–3937; Rudy, S. H., Brunton, S. L., Proctor, J. L., & Kutz, J. N. (2017). Data-driven discovery of partial differential equations. Science Advances, 3(4), e1602614.] is applied to recover the governing PDE. Building on the DeepMoD paradigm, GN-SINDy embeds greedy sampling into data acquisition and stabilises coefficient estimation through neural–enhanced differentiation. We analyze noise robustness, structural stability, and QR–based sampling strategies to guide sampler and hyperparameter selection. Experiments on Burgers', Allen–Cahn, and Korteweg–de Vries equations show that GN-SINDy reliably recovers governing PDEs using under 1% of the data, outperforming DeepMoD in efficiency, support recovery, and robustness to noise.