14,628 research outputs found
Nudging the particle filter
We investigate a new sampling scheme aimed at improving the performance of
particle filters whenever (a) there is a significant mismatch between the
assumed model dynamics and the actual system, or (b) the posterior probability
tends to concentrate in relatively small regions of the state space. The
proposed scheme pushes some particles towards specific regions where the
likelihood is expected to be high, an operation known as nudging in the
geophysics literature. We re-interpret nudging in a form applicable to any
particle filtering scheme, as it does not involve any changes in the rest of
the algorithm. Since the particles are modified, but the importance weights do
not account for this modification, the use of nudging leads to additional bias
in the resulting estimators. However, we prove analytically that nudged
particle filters can still attain asymptotic convergence with the same error
rates as conventional particle methods. Simple analysis also yields an
alternative interpretation of the nudging operation that explains its
robustness to model errors. Finally, we show numerical results that illustrate
the improvements that can be attained using the proposed scheme. In particular,
we present nonlinear tracking examples with synthetic data and a model
inference example using real-world financial data
Distributed Constrained Recursive Nonlinear Least-Squares Estimation: Algorithms and Asymptotics
This paper focuses on the problem of recursive nonlinear least squares
parameter estimation in multi-agent networks, in which the individual agents
observe sequentially over time an independent and identically distributed
(i.i.d.) time-series consisting of a nonlinear function of the true but unknown
parameter corrupted by noise. A distributed recursive estimator of the
\emph{consensus} + \emph{innovations} type, namely , is
proposed, in which the agents update their parameter estimates at each
observation sampling epoch in a collaborative way by simultaneously processing
the latest locally sensed information~(\emph{innovations}) and the parameter
estimates from other agents~(\emph{consensus}) in the local neighborhood
conforming to a pre-specified inter-agent communication topology. Under rather
weak conditions on the connectivity of the inter-agent communication and a
\emph{global observability} criterion, it is shown that at every network agent,
the proposed algorithm leads to consistent parameter estimates. Furthermore,
under standard smoothness assumptions on the local observation functions, the
distributed estimator is shown to yield order-optimal convergence rates, i.e.,
as far as the order of pathwise convergence is concerned, the local parameter
estimates at each agent are as good as the optimal centralized nonlinear least
squares estimator which would require access to all the observations across all
the agents at all times. In order to benchmark the performance of the proposed
distributed estimator with that of the centralized nonlinear
least squares estimator, the asymptotic normality of the estimate sequence is
established and the asymptotic covariance of the distributed estimator is
evaluated. Finally, simulation results are presented which illustrate and
verify the analytical findings.Comment: 28 pages. Initial Submission: Feb. 2016, Revised: July 2016,
Accepted: September 2016, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal and
Information Processing over Networks: Special Issue on Inference and Learning
over Network
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