“…Another systematic route to reduce the dimensionality of a system is given by the projection operator formalism [8][9][10]43]. In the following, we will focus on the MZ formalism, which was originally developed for Hamiltonian dynamics, but has been shown to also be applicable to stochastic systems [22][23][24][44][45][46]. In the next subsection, we will shortly recap the important properties of the MZ formalism along the lines of reference [24], and then explicitly evaluate the formal expressions for the specific SDE discussed in this work.…”