Joint learning of linear time-invariant dynamical systems

Abstract

Linear time-invariant systems are very popular models in system theory and applications. A fundamental problem in system identification that remains rather unaddressed in extant literature is to leverage commonalities amongst related systems to estimate their transition matrices more accurately. To address this problem, we investigate methods for jointly estimating the transition matrices of multiple systems. It is assumed that the transition matrices are unknown linear functions of some unknown shared basis matrices. We establish finite-time estimation error rates that fully reflect the roles of trajectory lengths, dimension, and number of systems under consideration. The presented results are fairly general and show the significant gains that can be achieved by pooling data across systems, in comparison to learning each system individually. Further, they are shown to be robust against moderate model misspecifications. To obtain the results, we develop novel techniques that are of independent interest and are applicable to similar problems. They include tightly bounding estimation errors in terms of the eigen-structures of transition matrices, establishing sharp high probability bounds for singular values of dependent random matrices, and capturing effects of misspecified transition matrices as the systems evolve over time.