Joint Bayesian estimation of process and measurement noise statistics in nonlinear Kalman filtering

Bayesian filtering aims at sequentially estimating the states and parameters in nonlinear dynamical systems, and finds applications in a variety of engineering fields. Extended and unscented Kalman filter are popular choices for this purpose as they typically achieve a good trade-off between computational complexity and accuracy, while still quantifying posterior uncertainty. However, the accuracy of the identified states and parameters, both in terms of their posterior mean and variance, is heavily influenced by the assumed statistics of both the process and measurement noise terms. Therefore, learning the noise characteristics becomes an essential aspect of Bayesian filtering, but is non-trivial especially in cases where process and measurement noise statistics are jointly non-identifiable. This article proposes a methodology that decomposes measurement and process noise learning in a fully Bayesian setting. For measurement noise estimation, we improve upon a Bayesian method that leverages conjugacy of the inverse-Wishart distribution with respect to the Gaussian likelihood model. For process noise estimation, Bayesian model averaging is coupled with a mutation scheme to compare the performance of competing models while exploring high-probability regions in the space of the unknown process noise variance. The algorithm is first tested on simple numerical models for both state estimation and parameter learning, highlighting the superior accuracy of the proposed measurement noise correction and the benefits of decoupling process and measurement noise learning in non-identifiable settings. Then we demonstrate the usefulness of this algorithm in more challenging problems, namely identification of a multi-degree-of-freedom system under unmeasured excitation, and modeling of the highly nonlinear response of a full-scale bridge pier using experimental data. • Framework jointly estimates states, parameters and noise statistics in UKF. • Measurement noise estimation leverages approximate conjugacy updates. • Process noise estimation is based on Bayesian model averaging, with mutations. • Handles ill-identifiability of process and measurement noise statistics. • Appropriate for state-input estimation and time-varying parameter identification.