Reconstructing phase dynamics of oscillator networks

Abstract: We generalize our recent approach to reconstruction of phase dynamics of coupled oscillators from data [B. Kralemann et al., Phys. Rev. E, 77, 066205 (2008)] to cover the case of small networks of coupled periodic units. Starting from the multivariate time series, we first reconstruct genuine phases and then obtain the coupling functions in terms of these phases. The partial norms of these coupling functions quantify directed coupling between oscillators. We illustrate the method by different network motifs for three coupled oscillators and for random networks of five and nine units. We also discuss nonlinear effects in coupling.