  We generalize our recent approach to reconstruction of phase dynamics of
coupled oscillators from data [B. Kralemann et al., Phys. Rev. E, 77, 066205
(2008)] to cover the case of small networks of coupled periodic units. Starting
from the multivariate time series, we first reconstruct genuine phases and then
obtain the coupling functions in terms of these phases. The partial norms of
these coupling functions quantify directed coupling between oscillators. We
illustrate the method by different network motifs for three coupled oscillators
and for random networks of five and nine units. We also discuss nonlinear
effects in coupling.

Chaotic Dynamics