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An Ensemble Kushner-Stratonovich (EnKS) Nonlinear Filter: Additive Particle Updates in Non-Iterative and Iterative Forms

Despite the cheap availability of computing resources enabling faster Monte Carlo simulations, the potential benefits of particle filtering in revealing accurate statistical information on the imprecisely known model parameters or modeling errors of dynamical systems, based on limited time series data, have not been quite realized. A major numerical bottleneck precipitating this under-performance, especially for higher dimensional systems, is the progressive particle impoverishment owing to weight collapse and the aim of the current work is to address this problem by replacing weight-based updates through additive ones. Thus, in the context of nonlinear filtering problems, a novel additive particle update scheme, in its non-iterative and iterative forms, is proposed based on manipulations of the innovation integral in the governing Kushner-Stratonovich equation. Numerical evidence for the identification of nonlinear and large dimensional dynamical systems indicates a substantively superior performance of the non- iterative version of the EnKS vis-à-vis most existing filters. The costlier iterative version, though conceptually elegant, mostly appears to effect a marginal improvement in the reconstruction accuracy over its non-iterative counterpart. Prominent in the reported numerical comparisons are variants of the Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) that also use additive updates, albeit with many inherent limitations of a Kalman filter.