Prevalence of Delay Embeddings with a Fixed Observation Function

Abstract: Let $x_{j+1}=\phi(x_{j})$, $x_{j}\in\mathbb{R}^{d}$, be a dynamical system with $\phi$ being a diffeomorphism. Although the state vector $x_{j}$ is often unobservable, the dynamics can be recovered from the delay vector $\left(o(x_{1}),\ldots,o(x_{D})\right)$, where $o$ is the scalar-valued observation function and $D$ is the embedding dimension. The delay map is an embedding for generic $o$, and more strongly, the embedding property is prevalent. We consider the situation where the observation function is fixed at $o=\pi_{1}$, with $\pi_{1}$ being the projection to the first coordinate. However, we allow polynomial perturbations to be applied directly to the diffeomorphism $\phi$, thus mimicking the way dynamical systems are parametrized. We prove that the delay map is an embedding with probability one with respect to the perturbations. Our proof introduces a new technique for proving prevalence using the concept of Lebesgue points.