Derivation of a sawtooth iterated extended Kalman smoother via the AECM algorithm

Abstract

The iterated extended Kalman smoother (IEKS) is derived under expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm formalism, providing insight into the behavior of the suboptimal extended Kalman filter (EKF) and smoother (EKS). Through an investigation of smoothing algorithms that result from variants of the EM algorithm, the sawtooth iterated extended Kalman smoother (SIEKS) and its computationally inexpensive counterparts are proposed via the alternating expectation conditional maximization (AECM) algorithm. The SIEKS is guaranteed to produce a sequence estimate that moves up the likelihood surface. Numerical simulations including frequency tracking examples display the superior performance of the sawtooth EKF over the standard EKF for a range of nonlinear signal models.