Data Assimilation by Conditioning on Future Observations

Conventional recursive filtering approaches, designed for quantifying the state of an evolving uncertain dynamical system with intermittent observations, use a sequence of (i) an uncertainty propagation step followed by (ii) a step where the associated data is assimilated using Bayes' rule. In this paper we switch the order of the steps to: (i) one step ahead data assimilation followed by (ii) uncertainty propagation. This route leads to a class of filtering algorithms named \emph{smoothing filters}. For a system driven by random noise, our proposed methods require the probability distribution of the driving noise after the assimilation to be biased by a nonzero mean. The system noise, conditioned on future observations, in turn pushes forward the filtering solution in time closer to the true state and indeed helps to find a more accurate approximate solution for the state estimation problem

A Gaussian Integral Filter with Multivariate Laplace Process Noise

This paper introduces the concept of the Gaussian integral filter (GIF), the limit of the Gaussian sum filter (GSF) for when the number of mixands tends to infinity. The GIF is obtained via a combination of GSF, quadrature, and interpolation. While it is a very general concept, in this paper the GIF is used to represent multiviariate Laplace (ML) distributions defining the process noise when tracking a maneuvering target. The filter is first applied to a linear three-dimensional toy problem, and then to a maneuvering target tracking problem in Earth orbit. For the more complex maneuvering target tracking problem, the filter requires only 1.4 times the computational resources of an unscented Kalman filter (UKF), while having errors up to 11 times smaller. For the same problem, the UKF slowly diverges.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Information Fusion, Charleston, SC, U.S.A., June 27-30, 202

A new algorithm for continuous-discrete filtering with randomly delayed measurements

This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in IET Control Theory & Applications and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at IET Digital Library.The filtering of nonlinear continuous-discrete systems is widely applicable in real-life and extensive literature is available to deal with such problems. However, all of these approaches are constrained with the assumption that the current measurement is available at every time step, although delay in measurement is natural in real-life applications. To deal with this problem, we re-derive the conventional Bayesian approximation framework for solving the continuous-discrete filtering problems. In practice, the delay is often smaller than one sampling time, which is the main case considered here. During the filtering of such systems, the actual time of correspondence should be known for a measurement received at the kth time instant. In this paper, a simple and intuitively justified cost function is used to decide the time to which the measurement at kth time instant actually corresponds. The performance of the proposed filter is compared with a conventional filter based on numerical integration which ignores random delays for a continuousdiscrete tracking problem. We show that the conventional filter fails to track the target while the modification proposed in this paper successfully deals with random delays. The proposed method may be seen as a valuable addition to the tools available for continuous-discrete filtering in nonlinear systems

Estimation, Decision and Applications to Target Tracking

This dissertation mainly consists of three parts. The first part proposes generalized linear minimum mean-square error (GLMMSE) estimation for nonlinear point estimation. The second part proposes a recursive joint decision and estimation (RJDE) algorithm for joint decision and estimation (JDE). The third part analyzes the performance of sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) when the log-likelihood ratios (LLR) are independent but not identically distributed. The linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) estimation plays an important role in nonlinear estimation. It searches for the best estimator in the set of all estimators that are linear in the measurement. A GLMMSE estimation framework is proposed in this disser- tation. It employs a vector-valued measurement transform function (MTF) and finds the best estimator among all estimators that are linear in MTF. Several design guidelines for the MTF based on a numerical example were provided. A RJDE algorithm based on a generalized Bayes risk is proposed in this dissertation for dynamic JDE problems. It is computationally efficient for dynamic problems where data are made available sequentially. Further, since existing performance measures for estimation or decision are effective to evaluate JDE algorithms, a joint performance measure is proposed for JDE algorithms for dynamic problems. The RJDE algorithm is demonstrated by applications to joint tracking and classification as well as joint tracking and detection in target tracking. The characteristics and performance of SPRT are characterized by two important functions—operating characteristic (OC) and average sample number (ASN). These two functions have been studied extensively under the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) LLR, which is too stringent for many applications. This dissertation relaxes the requirement of identical distribution. Two inductive equations governing the OC and ASN are developed. Unfortunately, they have non-unique solutions in the general case. They do have unique solutions in two special cases: (a) the LLR sequence converges in distributions and (b) the LLR sequence has periodic distributions. Further, the analysis can be readily extended to evaluate the performance of the truncated SPRT and the cumulative sum test

Approximate Gaussian conjugacy: parametric recursive filtering under nonlinearity, multimodality, uncertainty, and constraint, and beyond

Since the landmark work of R. E. Kalman in the 1960s, considerable efforts have been devoted to time series state space models for a large variety of dynamic estimation problems. In particular, parametric filters that seek analytical estimates based on a closed-form Markov–Bayes recursion, e.g., recursion from a Gaussian or Gaussian mixture (GM) prior to a Gaussian/GM posterior (termed ‘Gaussian conjugacy’ in this paper), form the backbone for a general time series filter design. Due to challenges arising from nonlinearity, multimodality (including target maneuver), intractable uncertainties (such as unknown inputs and/or non-Gaussian noises) and constraints (including circular quantities), etc., new theories, algorithms, and technologies have been developed continuously to maintain such a conjugacy, or to approximate it as close as possible. They had contributed in large part to the prospective developments of time series parametric filters in the last six decades. In this paper, we review the state of the art in distinctive categories and highlight some insights that may otherwise be easily overlooked. In particular, specific attention is paid to nonlinear systems with an informative observation, multimodal systems including Gaussian mixture posterior and maneuvers, and intractable unknown inputs and constraints, to fill some gaps in existing reviews and surveys. In addition, we provide some new thoughts on alternatives to the first-order Markov transition model and on filter evaluation with regard to computing complexity

Moment Estimation Using a Marginalized Transform

We present a method for estimating mean and covariance of a transformed Gaussian random variable. The method is based on evaluations of the transforming function and resembles the unscented transform and Gauss-Hermite integration in that respect. The information provided by the evaluations is used in a Bayesian framework to form a posterior description of the parameters in a model of the transforming function. Estimates are then derived by marginalizing these parameters from the analytical expression of the mean and covariance. An estimation algorithm, based on the assumption that the transforming function can be described using Hermite polynomials, is presented and applied to the non-linear filtering problem. The resulting marginalized transform (MT) estimator is compared to the cubature rule, the unscented transform and the divided difference estimator. The evaluations show that the presented method performs better than these methods, more specifically in estimating the covariance matrix. Contrary to the unscented transform, the resulting approximation of the covariance matrix is guaranteed to be positive-semidefinite