Unsupervised Constitutive Model Discovery from Sparse and Noisy Data

Abstract

Recently, unsupervised constitutive model discovery has gained attention through frameworks based on the Virtual Fields Method (VFM), most prominently the EUCLID approach. However, the performance of VFM-based approaches, including EUCLID, is affected by measurement noise and data sparsity, which are unavoidable in practice. The statistical finite element method (statFEM) offers a complementary perspective by providing a Bayesian framework for assimilating noisy and sparse measurements to reconstruct the full-field displacement response, together with quantified uncertainty. While statFEM recovers displacement fields under uncertainty, it does not strictly enforce consistency with constitutive relations. In this work, we integrate statFEM with unsupervised constitutive model discovery in the EUCLID framework, yielding statFEM-EUCLID. The framework is demonstrated for isotropic hyperelastic materials. The results show that this integration reduces sensitivity to noise and data sparsity, while ensuring that the reconstructed fields remain consistent with both equilibrium and constitutive laws.