Particle filters

Particle filters or Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a set of genetic-type particle Monte Carlo methodologies to solve arising in signal processing and Bayesian statistical inference. The consists of estimating the internal states in dynamical systems when partial observations are made, and random perturbations are present in the sensors as well as in the dynamical system. The objective is to compute the conditional probability (a.k.a. posterior distributions) of the states of some Markov process, given some noisy and partial observations. The term "particle filters" was first coined in 1996 by Del Moral in reference to mean field interacting particle methods used in fluid mechanics since the beginning of the 1960s. The terminology "sequential Monte Carlo" was proposed by Liu and Chen in 1998.

Particle filtering methodology uses a genetic type mutation-selection sampling approach, with a set of particles (also called individuals, or samples) to represent the posterior distribution of some given some noisy and/or partial observations. The state-space model can be nonlinear and the initial state and noise distributions can take any form required. Particle filter techniques provide a well-established methodology for generating samples from the required distribution without requiring assumptions about the state-space model or the state distributions. However, these methods do not perform well when applied to very high-dimensional systems.

Particle filters implement the prediction-updating transitions of the filtering equation directly by using a genetic type mutation-selection particle algorithm. The samples from the distribution are represented by a set of particles; each particle has a likelihood weight assigned to it that represents the probability of that particle being sampled from the probability density function. Weight disparity leading to weight collapse is a common issue encountered in these filtering algorithms; however it can be mitigated by including a resampling step before the weights become too uneven. Several adaptive resampling criteria can be used, including the variance of the weights and the relative entropy with respect to the uniform distribution. In the resampling step, the particles with negligible weights are replaced by new particles in the proximity of the particles with higher weights.

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