Optical matter (OM) systems are a class of active non-equilibrium materials. One of the most interesting variants consists of nano-particles (NPs) that form 2-dimensional ordered structures when illuminated and trapped by a focused laser beam. The force field developed by the electrodynamic interactions that hold the NPs together is non-conservative. Depending on the number of NPs and the phase, amplitude and polarization properties of the incident electromagnetic field, there are several different metastable ordered structures that can be formed. The relative stabilities of these structures can be tuned by adjusting the aforementioned laser beam properties. Therefore, the beam power, beam shape, spatial phase profile, and polarization of the light create a rich parameter subspace to explore stabilization, control and design of particular OM structures and their dynamics. Each of the one or more different ordered OM structures that form in a focused laser beam constitutes a (metastable) non-equilibrium steady state (NESS), which can, for example, be used to build optical matter machines that do mechanical work under a laser beam. In order to study the mechanically dynamic and light scattering properties of OM systems, I have developed and employed a data-driven approach based on principal component analysis (PCA) and harmonic linear discriminant analysis (HLDA) to determine the collective modes of non-conservative and overdamped OM structures. The approach is demonstrated via electrodynamics-Langevin dynamics simulations six electrodynamically-bound nanoparticles coupled to an incident laser beam. I then use this data-driven approach to build the PCA-HLDA reaction coordinates between stable states connected by Markov state model (MSM), compute entropy production rate, and analyze light scattering properties as well as induced-polarization. These studies represent a systematic endeavor to understanding and eventually controlling optical matter systems. This approach is also promising to the study of other non-conservative and overdamped active matter systems.