Effortless estimation of basins of attraction

Abstract

We present a fully automated method that identifies attractors and their basins of attraction without approximations of the dynamics. The method works by defining a finite state machine on top of the dynamical system flow. The input to the method is a dynamical system evolution rule and a grid that partitions the state space. No prior knowledge of the number, location, or nature of the attractors is required. The method works for arbitrarily high-dimensional dynamical systems, both discrete and continuous. It also works for stroboscopic maps, Poincaré maps, and projections of high-dimensional dynamics to a lower-dimensional space. The method is accompanied by a performant open-source implementation in the DynamicalSystems.jl library. The performance of the method outclasses the naïve approach of evolving initial conditions until convergence to an attractor, even when excluding the task of first identifying the attractors from the comparison. We showcase the power of our implementation on several scenarios, including interlaced chaotic attractors, high-dimensional state spaces, fractal basin boundaries, and interlaced attracting periodic orbits, among others. The output of our method can be straightforwardly used to calculate concepts, such as basin stability and final state sensitivity.