Yes, parameter estimations methods are suitable to do so. There are many works about this topic in the literature. There also also several tool box in Matlab for this purpose. However, i think that SSm is the best algorithm to do so. please see the attached paper.
why parameter estimation? there are ode solvers in matlab for this and in R as well, for instance http://it.mathworks.com/help/matlab/math/ordinary-differential-equations.html
That depends on your ODE, Euler can underestimate curvature because of the simple projection scheme; hence Maghnia's comment to use a higher order integration scheme (Matteo's suggestion to use Matlab's ODE solver is nice because they will adjust the step-size for you--assuming you want such automation).
Katsikadelis, J.T. "A NEW DIRECT TIME INTEGRATION METHOD FOR THE SEMI-DISCRETE PARABOLIC EQUATION", 8th GRACM International Congress on Computational Mechanics, Volos, Greece, 12 July – 15 July 2015
The method is very efficient, unconditionally stable, converge energy and very simple to implement.
You can download the paper from Katsikadelis' Research-gate webpage. The journal paper will appear in due time.