Meta-state–space learning: An identification approach for stochastic dynamical systems

Abstract

Available methods for identification of stochastic dynamical systems from input–output data generally impose restricting structural assumptions on either the noise structure in the data-generating system or the possible state probability distributions. In this paper, we introduce a novel identification method of such systems, which results in a dynamical model that is able to produce the time-varying output distribution accurately without taking restrictive assumptions on the data-generating process. The method is formulated by first deriving a novel and exact representation of a wide class of nonlinear stochastic systems in a so-called meta-state–space form, where the meta-state can be interpreted as a parameter vector of a state probability function space parameterization. As the resulting representation of the meta-state dynamics is deterministic, we can capture the stochastic system based on a deterministic model, which is highly attractive for identification. The meta-state–space representation often involves unknown and heavily nonlinear functions, hence, we propose an artificial neural network (ANN)-based identification method capable of efficiently learning nonlinear meta-state–space models. We demonstrate that the proposed identification method can obtain models with a log-likelihood close to the theoretical limit even for highly nonlinear, highly stochastic systems.