Duality for nonlinear filtering

TL;DR

This thesis explores duality principles in nonlinear filtering, establishing controllability-observability links, formulating the filtering as an optimal control problem, and analyzing filter stability through dual control methods.

Contribution

It introduces a dual control framework for nonlinear filtering, linking observability to controllability, and provides new stability analysis techniques based on dual optimal control.

Findings

Dual controllability characterizes stochastic observability.

Optimal control formulation yields the nonlinear filter.

Filter stability is linked to dual control system stabilizability.

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the stochastic filtering problem for a hidden Markov model (HMM) with the white noise observation model. For this filtering problem, we make three types of original contributions: (1) dual controllability characterization of stochastic observability, (2) dual minimum variance optimal control formulation of the stochastic filtering problem, and (3) filter stability analysis using the dual optimal control formulation. For the first contribution of this thesis, a backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) is proposed as the dual control system. The observability (detectability) of the HMM is shown to be equivalent to the controllability (stabilizability) of the dual control system. For the linear-Gaussian model, the dual relationship reduces to classical duality in linear systems theory. The second contribution is to transform the minimum variance estimation problem into an optimal control problem. The constraint is given by the dual control system. The optimal solution is obtained via two approaches: (1) by an application of maximum principle and (2) by the martingale characterization of the optimal value. The optimal solution is used to derive the nonlinear filter. The third contribution is to carry out filter stability analysis by studying the dual optimal control problem. Two approaches are presented through Chapters 7 and 8. In Chapter 7, conditional Poincar\'e inequality (PI) is introduced. Based on conditional PI, various convergence rates are obtained and related to literature. In Chapter 8, the stabilizability of the dual control system is shown to be a necessary and sufficient condition for filter stability on certain finite state space model.