Robustness of Nonlinear Filters Over the Infinite Time Interval

Abstract

Nonlinear filtering is one of the classical areas of stochastic control. From the point of view of practical usefulness, it is important that the filter not be too sensitive to the assumptions made on the initial distribution, the transition function of the underlying signal process and the model for the observation. This is particularly acute if the filter is of interest over a very long or potentially infinite time interval. Then the effects of small errors in the model which is used to construct the filter might accumulate to make the output useless for large time. The problem of asymptotic sensitivity to the initial condition has been treated in several papers. We are concerned with this as well as with the sensitivity to the signal model, uniformly over the infinite time interval. It is conceivable that the effects of even small errors in the model will accumulate so that the filter will eventually be useless. The robustness is shown for three classes of problems. For the first two cases, the signal model is Markov and the observations are taken in discrete time, and the observation is the usual function of the signal plus noise. The last class treated is a continuous time Markov process, with a point process observation.