chemical reaction system by Kim et al.
12
but also used by
Molkov et al.
13
to determine embedding dimension from
noisy time series. In the same year, Smith
14
applied the
radial basis function to model chaotic time series by mini-
mizing the error of linear fitting of all basis functions and
explaining nonlinearity by basis functions. This method was
used by Pilgram et al.
15
to model the dynamics of nonlinear
time series and also used by Suzuki et al.
16
to examine some
measures used for evaluating the validity of nonlinear mod-
eling. In 1994 Gouesbet and Letellier
17
designed a multivari-
able polynomial for global vector-field reconst ruction aimed
at finding the relationship between the current state and its
derivatives from one single time series. In the same year,
Hiew et al.
18
built chaotic time series with fuzzy logic by
turning numerical variables into qualitative description. This
method is used to demonstrate strong nonlinearity via imitat-
ing the human’s nondeterministic conceptual judgment and
logical thinking. However, people seldom model in this way
due to the large error in numerical transformation. In 1995
Cao
19
present wavelet-based model to model chaotic time
series which is like a radial basis function (RBF) model. The
wavelet functions coming from the expansion and conver-
sion of wavelet prototype provide more nonlinear expression
and selection. Degaudenzi and Arizmendi
20
practiced model-
ing in this way to forecast an airborne pollen time series, and
Wei and Billings
21
investigated many structure selection
algorithms for wavelet models of chaotic systems. In 1998
Bagarinao et al.
22
introduced discrete-time polynomials into
chaotic time series, which could better show nonlinearity
compared with RBF model. It is permitted to select proper
basis functions according to the properties of the modeling
data and to model by exploiting the linear combination
among the basis functions. Aguirre et al.
23
had ever forecast
that way the time series of sunspot numbers. Then we intro-
duce rational model. Rational model was first analytically
proposed by Gouesbet
24
in 1991, but it had not been prac-
ticed until 2000 when Correa et al.
25
modeled time series
derived from electronic oscillator.
Fuzzy logic method may suffer unpredictable error due
to its transformation between qualitative and quantitative
representation. All other methods above use either error min-
imization strategy or an acceptable error to end the modeling
process, making it hard to recover original data from these
models. This means the models lose some information of the
time series. Moreover, these methods have other potential
problems, such as the ability to explain nonlinearity, the
numerical stability, the selection of polynomials and parame-
ters, and the model runtime. All these shortcomings may
cause uncertainty for exhibiting the original system.
Interpolation is very useful for solving differential equa-
tions with a small modeling error. Therefore, based on the
idea of studying the physical phenomenon from geometric as-
pect, we make use of non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS)
as the tool and develop a high-precision interpolation frame-
work to deal with arbitrary-dimensional time series by intro-
ducing the time parameter into the time-insensitive NURBS.
There are good reasons to choose NURBS. First a
NURBS curve is shown as a unified mathematical expression
and able to represent a continuous curve at any precision.
In theory, once we have enough information, we can
reconstruct the system’s real motion behavior trajectory,
described as normalized unified mathematical expression.
Furthermore, each data point in NURBS curve is a weighted
sum of nearby control points, and the basic formula of
NURBS is a division by two polynomials of control points
and weights, making it capable of explaining the nonlinearity
of time series. Finally, the calculation of a NURBS curve is
numerically stable and time saving (the running time is
O(NlogN)). All these advantages indicate that NURBS
should be the best carrier to interpolate chaotic time series.
In Sec. II, we introduce how to interpolate arbitrary-
dimensional data to reconstruct a finite trajectory by S-NURBS
model. Section III presents the validation of S-NURBS method
by five benchmark chaotic systems. After validation, the
S-NURBS framework is applied to Musa standard dataset
(Musa dataset is very classic in the area of software reliability)
in Sec. IV. Finally, the main conclusions about the S-NURBS
framework are drawn in Sec. V.
II. S-NURBS FRAMEWORK
How to add time parameter into geometrical tool is the
key factor to implement the idea. Shao and Xiao
26
did some
pioneering work for this issue. As an intensive study, the
method is optimized for better performance. We adopt more
methods to calculate the knot vector and develop a more
accurate algorithm to map time parameter. In this section,
we introduce the improved method to calculate the parame-
ters in NURBS method from chaotic data and to add time
parameter into NURBS expression. Generally, we conduct
sector mapping between occurred time and knot vector (knot
vector is a parameter in calculating NURBS, see below) to
get a continuous smooth curve which indicates a possible
trajectory of the system.
Given a short piece of time series X ¼fx
1
; x
2
; …; x
n
g,
two procedures are used to build an S-NURBS model. First,
we construct a K-order NURBS expression to describe the
movement showing by the time series. Then we add the
occurred time into the NURBS expression. The smooth
curve with occurred time is the so-called S-NURBS model,
which passes every point in X.
A. Constructing a K-order NURBS expression
A complete K-order NURBS expression is shown in
Eq. (1)
cðuÞ¼
X
n
i¼0
p
i
w
i
N
i;k
ðuÞ
X
n
i¼0
w
i
N
i;k
ðuÞ
: (1)
In this expression, p
i
is the control point, x
i
is the
weight, N(u) is the B-spine basis function, and u is a continu-
ous value bounded by knot vector and widely defined to
range in [0,1]. It reflects the changing process of the data
points on the curve. The knot vector is used as a general
frame to reflect the distribution of data points.
033132-2 Shao et al. Chaos 23, 033132 (2013)