A practical method for the consistent identification of a module in a dynamical network
This work addresses the practical challenge of identifying modules in dynamical networks for control and signal processing applications, offering a simpler and more feasible approach than existing methods.
The paper presents a new method for consistently identifying a single transfer function in a dynamical network, requiring only local topology knowledge and simple conditions on excitation and measurement nodes, unlike existing methods that rely on global topology and spectral positivity conditions.
We present a new and simple method for the identification of a single transfer function that is embedded in a dynamical network. In existing methods the consistent identification of the desired transfer function relies on the positive definiteness of the spectral density matrix of the vector of all node signals, and it typically requires knowledge of the topology of the whole network. The positivity condition is on the internal signals and therefore can not be guaranteed a priori, in addition it is far from necessary. The new method of this paper provides simple conditions on which nodes to excite and which nodes to measure in order to produce a consistent estimate of the desired transfer function. Just as importantly, it requires knowledge of the local topology only.