Data-driven Control of Hypergraphs: Leveraging THIS to Damp Noise in Diffusive Hypergraphs

Abstract: Controllability determines whether a system's state can be guided toward any desired configuration, making it a fundamental prerequisite for designing effective control strategies. In the context of networked systems, controllability is a well-established concept. However, many real-world systems, from biological collectives to engineered infrastructures, exhibit higher-order interactions that cannot be captured by simple graphs. Moreover, the way in which agents interact and influence one another is often unknown and must be inferred from partial observations of the system. Here, we close the loop between a hypergraph representation and our recently developed hypergraph inference algorithm, THIS, to infer the underlying multibody couplings. Building on the inferred structure, we design a parsimonious controller that, given a minimal set of controllable nodes, steers the system toward a desired configuration. We validate the proposed system identification and control framework on a network of Kuramoto oscillators evolving over a hypergraph.