  We consider complex dynamical systems showing metastable behavior but no
local separation of fast and slow time scales. The article raises the question
of whether such systems exhibit a low-dimensional manifold supporting its
effective dynamics. For answering this question, we aim at finding nonlinear
coordinates, called reaction coordinates, such that the projection of the
dynamics onto these coordinates preserves the dominant time scales of the
dynamics. We show that, based on a specific reducibility property, the
existence of good low-dimensional reaction coordinates preserving the dominant
time scales is guaranteed. Based on this theoretical framework, we develop and
test a novel numerical approach for computing good reaction coordinates. The
proposed algorithmic approach is fully local and thus not prone to the curse of
dimension with respect to the state space of the dynamics. Hence, it is a
promising method for data-based model reduction of complex dynamical systems
such as molecular dynamics.
