A Novel Robust Kalman Filtering Framework Based on Normal-Skew Mixture Distribution

Abstract

In this article, a novel normal-skew mixture (NSM) distribution is presented to model the normal and/or heavy-tailed and/or skew nonstationary distributed noises. The NSM distribution can be formulated as a hierarchically Gaussian presentation by leveraging a Bernoulli distributed random variable. Based on this, a novel robust Kalman filtering framework can be developed utilizing the variational Bayesian method, where the one-step prediction and measurement-likelihood densities are modeled as NSM distributions. For implementation, several exemplary robust Kalman filters (KFs) are derived based on some specific cases of NSM distribution. The relationships between some existing robust KFs and the presented framework are also revealed. The superiority of the proposed robust Kalman filtering framework is validated by a target tracking simulation example.