A discontinuous extended Kalman filter for non-smooth dynamic problems

Problems that result into locally non-differentiable and hence non-smooth state-space equations are often encountered in engineering. Examples include problems involving material laws pertaining to plasticity, impact and highly non-linear phenomena. Estimating the parameters of such systems poses a challenge, particularly since the majority of system identification algorithms are formulated on the basis of smooth systems under the assumption of observability, identifiability and time invariance. For a smooth system, an observable state remains observable throughout the system evolution with the exception of few selected realizations of the state vector. However, for a non-smooth system the observable set of states and parameters may vary during the evolution of the system throughout a dynamic analysis. This may cause standard identification (ID) methods, such as the Extended Kalman Filter, to temporarily diverge and ultimately fail in accurately identifying the parameters of the system. In this work, the influence of observability of non-smooth systems to the performance of the Extended and Unscented Kalman Filters is discussed and a novel algorithm particularly suited for this purpose, termed the Discontinuous Extended Kalman Filter (DEKF), is proposed

A Nonstationary Hidden Markov Model with Approximately Infinitely-Long Time-Dependencies

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are a popular approach for modeling sequential data, typically based on the assumption of a first-order Markov chain. In other words, only one-step back dependencies are modeled which is a rather unrealistic assumption in most applications. In this paper, we propose a method for postulating HMMs with approximately infinitely-long time-dependencies. Our approach considers the whole history of model states in the postulated dependencies, by making use of a recently proposed nonparametric Bayesian method for modeling label sequences with infinitely-long time dependencies, namely the sequence memoizer. We manage to derive training and inference algorithms for our model with computational costs identical to simple first-order HMMs, despite its entailed infinitely-long time-dependencies, by employing a mean-field-like approximation. The efficacy of our proposed model is experimentally demonstrated

A Spatially-Constrained Normalized Gamma Process for Data Clustering

Part 9: ClusteringInternational audienceIn this work, we propose a novel nonparametric Bayesian method for clustering of data with spatial interdependencies. Specifically, we devise a novel normalized Gamma process, regulated by a simplified (pointwise) Markov random field (Gibbsian) distribution with a countably infinite number of states. As a result of its construction, the proposed model allows for introducing spatial dependencies in the clustering mechanics of the normalized Gamma process, thus yielding a novel nonparametric Bayesian method for spatial data clustering. We derive an efficient truncated variational Bayesian algorithm for model inference. We examine the efficacy of our approach by considering an image segmentation application using a real-world dataset. We show that our approach outperforms related methods from the field of Bayesian nonparametrics, including the infinite hidden Markov random field model, and the Dirichlet process prior