Particle Gaussian Mixture Filters for Nonlinear Non-Gaussian Bayesian Estimation

Nonlinear filtering is the problem of estimating the state of a stochastic nonlinear dynamical system using noisy observations. It is well known that the posterior state estimates in nonlinear problems may assume non-Gaussian multimodal probability densities. We present an unscented Kalman-particle hybrid filtering framework for tracking the three dimensional motion of a space object. The hybrid filtering scheme is designed to provide accurate and consistent estimates when measurements are sparse without incurring a large computational cost. It employs an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) for estimation when measurements are available. When the target is outside the field of view (FOV) of the sensor, it updates the state probability density function (PDF) via a sequential Monte Carlo method. The hybrid filter addresses the problem of particle depletion through a suitably designed filter transition scheme. The performance of the hybrid filtering approach is assessed by simulating two test cases of space objects that are assumed to undergo full three dimensional orbital motion. Having established its performance in the space object tracking problem, we extend the hybrid approach to the general multimodal estimation problem. We propose a particle Gaussian mixture-I (PGM-I) filter for nonlinear estimation that is free of the particle depletion problem inherent to most particle filters. The PGM-I filter employs an ensemble of randomly sampled states for the propagation of state probability density. A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) of the propagated PDF is then recovered by clustering the ensemble. The posterior density is obtained subsequently through a Kalman measurement update of the mixture modes. We prove the convergence in probability of the resultant density to the true filter density assuming exponential forgetting of initial conditions by the true filter. The PGM-I filter is capable of handling the non-Gaussianity of the state PDF arising from dynamics, initial conditions or process noise. A more general estimation scheme titled PGM-II filter that can also handle non-Gaussianity related to measurement update is considered next. The PGM-II filter employs a parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample from the posterior PDF. The PGM-II filter update is asymptotically exact and does not enforce any assumptions on the number of Gaussian modes. We test the performance of the PGM filters on a number of benchmark filtering problems chosen from recent literature. The PGM filtering performance is compared with that of other general purpose nonlinear filters such as the feedback particle filter and the log homotopy based particle flow filters. The results also indicate that the PGM filters can perform at par with or better than other general purpose nonlinear filters such as the feedback particle filter (FPF) and the log homotopy based particle flow filters. Based on the results, we derive important guidelines on the choice between the PGM-I and PGM-II filters. Furthermore, we conceive an extension of the PGM-I filter, namely the augmented PGM-I filter, for handling the nonlinear/non- Gaussian measurement update without incurring a large computational penalty. A preliminary design for a decentralized PGM-I filter for the distributed estimation problem is also obtained. Finally we conduct a more detailed study on the performance of the parallel MCMC algorithm. It is found that running several parallel Markov chains can lead to significant computational savings in sampling problems that involve multi modal target densities. We also show that the parallel MCMC method can be used to solve global optimization problems

Parallelized Particle and Gaussian Sum Particle Filters for Large Scale Freeway Traffic Systems

Large scale traffic systems require techniques able to: 1) deal with high amounts of data and heterogenous data coming from different types of sensors, 2) provide robustness in the presence of sparse sensor data, 3) incorporate different models that can deal with various traffic regimes, 4) cope with multimodal conditional probability density functions for the states. Often centralized architectures face challenges due to high communication demands. This paper develops new estimation techniques able to cope with these problems of large traffic network systems. These are Parallelized Particle Filters (PPFs) and a Parallelized Gaussian Sum Particle Filter (PGSPF) that are suitable for on-line traffic management. We show how complex probability density functions of the high dimensional trafc state can be decomposed into functions with simpler forms and the whole estimation problem solved in an efcient way. The proposed approach is general, with limited interactions which reduces the computational time and provides high estimation accuracy. The efciency of the PPFs and PGSPFs is evaluated in terms of accuracy, complexity and communication demands and compared with the case where all processing is centralized

A New Reduction Scheme for Gaussian Sum Filters

In many signal processing applications it is required to estimate the unobservable state of a dynamic system from its noisy measurements. For linear dynamic systems with Gaussian Mixture (GM) noise distributions, Gaussian Sum Filters (GSF) provide the MMSE state estimate by tracking the GM posterior. However, since the number of the clusters of the GM posterior grows exponentially over time, suitable reduction schemes need to be used to maintain the size of the bank in GSF. In this work we propose a low computational complexity reduction scheme which uses an initial state estimation to find the active noise clusters and removes all the others. Since the performance of our proposed method relies on the accuracy of the initial state estimation, we also propose five methods for finding this estimation. We provide simulation results showing that with suitable choice of the initial state estimation (based on the shape of the noise models), our proposed reduction scheme provides better state estimations both in terms of accuracy and precision when compared with other reduction methods

GP-SUM. Gaussian Processes Filtering of non-Gaussian Beliefs

This work studies the problem of stochastic dynamic filtering and state propagation with complex beliefs. The main contribution is GP-SUM, a filtering algorithm tailored to dynamic systems and observation models expressed as Gaussian Processes (GP), and to states represented as a weighted sum of Gaussians. The key attribute of GP-SUM is that it does not rely on linearizations of the dynamic or observation models, or on unimodal Gaussian approximations of the belief, hence enables tracking complex state distributions. The algorithm can be seen as a combination of a sampling-based filter with a probabilistic Bayes filter. On the one hand, GP-SUM operates by sampling the state distribution and propagating each sample through the dynamic system and observation models. On the other hand, it achieves effective sampling and accurate probabilistic propagation by relying on the GP form of the system, and the sum-of-Gaussian form of the belief. We show that GP-SUM outperforms several GP-Bayes and Particle Filters on a standard benchmark. We also demonstrate its use in a pushing task, predicting with experimental accuracy the naturally occurring non-Gaussian distributions.Comment: WAFR 2018, 16 pages, 7 figure