MANUSCRIPT 3
technique is a kind of stochastic sampling approach aim-
ing to tackle the complex systems which are analytically
intractable. The power of Monte Carlo methods is that
they can attack the difficult numerical integration prob-
lems. In recent years, sequential Monte Carlo approaches
have attracted more and more attention to the researchers
from different areas, with many successful applications in
statistics (see e.g. the March special issue of 2001 Annals
of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics), sig-
nal processing (see e.g., the February special issue of 2002
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing), machine
learning, econometrics, automatic control, tracking, com-
munications, biology, and many others (e.g., see [141] and
the references therein). One of the attractive merits of se-
quential Monte Carlo approaches lies in the fact that they
allow on-line estimation by combining the powerful Monte
Carlo sampling methods with Bayesian inference, at an ex-
pense of reasonable computational cost. In particular, the
sequential Monte Carlo approach has been used in parame-
ter estimation and state estimation, for the latter of which
it is sometimes called particle filter.
5
The basic idea of
particle filter is to use a number of independent random
variables called particles,
6
sampled directly from the state
space, to represent the posterior probability, and update
the posterior by involving the new observations; the “par-
ticle system” is properly located, weighted, and propagated
recursively according to the Bayesian rule. In retrospect,
the earliest idea of Monte Carlo method used in statisti-
cal inference is found in [200], [201], and later in [5], [6],
[506], [433], [258], but the formal establishment of particle
filter seems fair to be due to Gordon, Salmond and Smith
[193], who introduced certain novel resampling technique
to the formulation. Almost in the meantime, a number
of statisticians also independently rediscovered and devel-
oped the sampling-importance-resampling (SIR) idea [414],
[266], [303], which was originally proposed by Rubin [395],
[397] in a non-dynamic framework.
7
The rediscovery and
renaissance of particle filters in the mid-1990s (e.g. [259],
[222], [229], [304], [307], [143], [40]) after a long dominant
period, partially thanks to the ever increasing computing
power. Recently, a lot of work has been done to improve
the performance of particle filters [69], [189], [428], [345],
[456], [458], [357]. Also, many doctoral theses were devoted
to Monte Carlo filtering and inference from different per-
spectives [191], [142], [162], [118], [221], [228], [35], [97],
[365], [467], [86].
It is noted that particle filter is not the only leaf in the
Bayesian filtering tree, in the sense that Bayesian filtering
can be also tackled with other techniques, such as differen-
5
Many other terminologies also exist in the literature, e.g., SIS fil-
ter, SIR filter, bootstrap filter, sequential imputation, or CONDEN-
SATION algorithm (see [224] for many others), though they are ad-
dressed differently in different areas. In this paper, we treat them as
different variants within the generic Monte Carlo filter family. Monte
Carlo filters are not all sequential Monte Carlo estimation.
6
The particle filter is called normal if it produces i.i.d. samples;
sometimes it is deliberately to introduce negative correlations among
the particles for the sake of variance reduction.
7
The earliest idea of multiple imputation due to Rubin was pub-
lished in 1978 [394].
tial geometry approach, variational method, or conjugate
method. Some potential future directions, will be consid-
ering combining these methods with Monte Carlo sampling
techniques, as we will discuss in the paper. The attention
of this paper, however, is still on the Monte Carlo methods
and particularly sequential Monte Carlo estimation.
D. Outline of Paper
In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of
stochastic filtering theory from Bayesian perspective. [It
happens to be almost three decades after the 1974 publica-
tion of Prof. Thomas Kailath’s illuminating review paper
“A view of three decades of linear filtering theory” [244],
we take this opportunity to dedicate this paper to him who
has greatly contributed to the literature in stochastic filter-
ing theory.] With the tool of Bayesian statistics, it turns
out that the celebrated Kalman filter is a special case of
Bayesian filtering under the LQG (linear, quadratic, Gaus-
sian) circumstance, a fact that was first observed by Ho
and Lee [212]; particle filters are also essentially rooted
in Bayesian statistics, in the spirit of recursive Bayesian
estimation. To our interest, the attention will be given to
the nonlinear, non-Gaussian and non-stationary situations
where we mostly encounter in the real world. Generally for
nonlinear filtering, no exact solution can be obtained, or the
solution is infinite-dimensional,
8
hence various numerical
approximation methods come in to address the intractabil-
ity. In particular, we focus our attention on sequential
Monte Carlo method which allows on-line estimation in a
Bayesian perspective. The historic root and remarks of
Monte Carlo filtering are traced. Other Bayesian filtering
approaches other than Monte Carlo framework are also re-
viewed. Besides, we extend our discussion from Bayesian
filtering to Bayesian inference, in the latter of which the
well-known hidden Markov model (HMM) (a.k.a. HMM
filter), dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) and Bayesian
kernel machines are also briefly discussed.
Nowadays Bayesian filtering has become such a broad
topic involving many scientific areas that a comprehen-
sive survey and detailed treatment seems crucial to cater
the ever growing demands of understanding this important
field for many novices, though it is noticed by the author
that in the literature there exist a number of excellent tuto-
rial papers on particle filters and Monte Carlo filters [143],
[144], [19], [438], [443], as well as relevant edited volumes
[141] and books [185], [173], [306], [82]. Unfortunately, as
observed in our comprehensive bibliographies, a lot of pa-
pers were written by statisticians or physicists with some
special terminologies, which might be unfamiliar to many
engineers. Besides, the papers were written with different
nomenclatures for different purposes (e.g. the convergence
and asymptotic results are rarely cared in engineering but
are important for the statisticians). The author, thus, felt
obligated to write a tutorial paper on this emerging and
promising area for the readership of engineers, and to in-
troduce the reader many techniques developed in statistics
8
Or the sufficient statistics is infinite-dimensional.