Bayesian-EUCLID: Discovering hyperelastic material laws with uncertainties

Within the scope of our recent approach for Efficient Unsupervised Constitutive Law Identification and Discovery (EUCLID), we propose an unsupervised Bayesian learning framework for discovery of parsimonious and interpretable constitutive laws with quantifiable uncertainties. As in deterministic EUCLID, we do not resort to stress data, but only to realistically measurable full-field displacement and global reaction force data; as opposed to calibration of an a priori assumed model, we start with a constitutive model ansatz based on a large catalog of candidate functional features; we leverage domain knowledge by including features based on existing, both physics-based and phenomenological, constitutive models. In the new Bayesian-EUCLID approach, we use a hierarchical Bayesian model with sparsity-promoting priors and Monte Carlo sampling to efficiently solve the parsimonious model selection task and discover physically consistent constitutive equations in the form of multivariate multi-modal probabilistic distributions. We demonstrate and validate the ability to accurately and efficiently recover isotropic and anisotropic hyperelastic models like the Neo-Hookean, Isihara, Gent–Thomas, Arruda–Boyce, Ogden, and Holzapfel models in both elastostatics and elastodynamics. The discovered constitutive models are reliable under both epistemic uncertainties — i.e. uncertainties on the true features of the constitutive catalog – and aleatoric uncertainties – which arise from the noise in the displacement field data, and are automatically estimated by the hierarchical Bayesian model.