In this article, we present an overview of methods for sequential simulation from posterior distributions. These methods are of particular interest in Bayesian filtering for discrete time dynamic models that are typically nonlinear and non-Gaussian. A general importance sampling framework is developed that unifies many of the methods which have been proposed over the last few decades in several different scientific disciplines. Novel extensions to the existing methods are also proposed. We show in particular how to incorporate local linearisation methods similar to those which have previously been employed in the determin-istic filtering literature; these lead to very effective importance distributions. Furthermore we describe a method which uses Rao-Blackwellisation in order to take advantage of the analytic structure present in some important classes of state-space models. In a final section we develop algorithms for prediction, smoothing and evaluation of the likelihood in dynamic models.

A general framework for using Monte Carlo methods in dynamic systems is provided and its wide applications indicated. Under this framework, several currently available techniques are studied and generalized to accommodate more complex features. All of these methods are partial combinations of three ingredients: importance sampling and resampling, rejection sampling, and Markov chain iterations. We deliver a guideline on how they should be used and under what circumstance each method is most suitable. Through the analysis of differences and connections, we consolidate these methods into a generic algorithm by combining desirable features. In addition, we propose a general use of Rao-Blackwellization to improve performances. Examples from econometrics and engineering are presented to demonstrate the importance of Rao-Blackwellization and to compare different Monte Carlo procedures. Keywords: Blind deconvolution; Bootstrap filter; Gibbs sampling; Hidden Markov model; Kalman filter; Markov...

Particle filters (PFs) are powerful sampling-based inference/learning algorithms for dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs). They allow us to treat, in a principled way, any type of probability distribution, nonlinearity and non-stationarity. They have appeared in several fields under such names as “condensation”, “sequential Monte Carlo” and “survival of the fittest”. In this paper, we show how we can exploit the structure of the DBN to increase the efficiency of particle filtering, using a technique known as Rao-Blackwellisation. Essentially, this samples some of the variables, and marginalizes out the rest exactly, using the Kalman filter, HMM filter, junction tree algorithm, or any other finite dimensional optimal filter. We show that Rao-Blackwellised particle filters (RBPFs) lead to more accurate estimates than standard PFs. We demonstrate RBPFs on two problems, namely non-stationary online regression with radial basis function networks and robot localization and map building. We also discuss other potential application areas and provide references to some Þnite dimensional optimal filters.

This purpose of this introductory paper is threefold. First, it introduces the Monte Carlo method with emphasis on probabilistic machine learning. Second, it reviews the main building blocks of modern Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation, thereby providing and introduction to the remaining papers of this special issue. Lastly, it discusses new interesting research horizons.

Simulated annealing --- moving from a tractable distribution to a distribution of interest via a sequence of intermediate distributions --- has traditionally been used as an inexact method of handling isolated modes in Markov chain samplers. Here, it is shown how one can use the Markov chain transitions for such an annealing sequence to define an importance sampler. The Markov chain aspect allows this method to perform acceptably even for high-dimensional problems, where finding good importance sampling distributions would otherwise be very difficult, while the use of importance weights ensures that the estimates found converge to the correct values as the number of annealing runs increases. This annealed importance sampling procedure resembles the second half of the previously-studied tempered transitions, and can be seen as a generalization of a recently-proposed variant of sequential importance sampling. It is also related to thermodynamic integration methods for estimating ratios...

In this paper, we propose a new particle filter based on sequential importance sampling. The algorithm uses a bank of unscented filters to obtain the importance proposal distribution. This proposal has two very "nice" properties. Firstly, it makes efficient use of the latest available information and, secondly, it can have heavy tails. As a result, we find that the algorithm outperforms standard particle filtering and other nonlinear filtering methods very substantially. This experimental finding is in agreement with the theoretical convergence proof for the algorithm. The algorithm also includes resampling and (possibly) Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) steps.

In treating dynamic systems, sequential Monte Carlo methods use discrete samples to represent a complicated probability distribution and use rejection sampling, importance sampling, and weighted resampling to complete the on-line "filtering" task. In this article we propose a special sequential Monte Carlo method, the mixture Kalman filter, which uses random mixture of normal distributions to represent a target distribution. It is designed for on-line estimation and prediction of conditional and partial conditional dynamic linear models, which are themselves a class of widely used nonlinear system and also serve to approximate many other nonlinear systems. Compared with a few available filtering methods including Monte Carlo ones, the efficiency gain provided by the mixture Kalman filter can be very substantial. Another contribution of this article is the formulation of many nonlinear systems into conditional or partial conditional linear form, to which the mixture Kalman filter can be...

Jump Markov linear systems (JMLS) are linear systems whose parameters evolve with time according to a finite state Markov chain. In this paper, our aim is to recursively compute optimal state estimates for this class of systems. We present efficient simulation-based algorithms called particle filters to solve the optimal filtering problem as well as the optimal fixed-lag smoothing problem. Our algorithms combine sequential importance sampling, a selection scheme, and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. They use several variance reduction methods to make the most of the statistical structure of JMLS.

In this paper, we propose a general algorithm to sample sequentially from a sequence of probability distributions known up to a normalizing constant and de ned on a common space. A sequence of increasingly large arti cial joint distributions is built; each of these distributions admits a marginal which is a distribution of interest. To sample from these distributions, we use sequential Monte Carlo methods. We show that these methods can be interpreted as interacting particle approximations of a nonlinear Feynman-Kac ow in distribution space. One interpretation of the Feynman-Kac ow corresponds to a nonlinear Markov kernel admitting a speci ed invariant distribution and is a natural nonlinear extension of the standard Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Many theoretical results have already been established for such ows and their particle approximations. We demonstrate the use of these algorithms through simulation.

We develop methods for performing smoothing computations in general state-space models. The methods rely on a particle representation of the filtering distributions, and their evolution through time using sequential importance sampling and resampling ideas. In particular, novel techniques are presented for generation of sample realizations of historical state sequences. This is carried out in a forwardfiltering backward-smoothing procedure which can be viewed as the non-linear, non-Gaussian counterpart of standard Kalman filter-based simulation smoothers in the linear Gaussian case. Convergence in the mean-squared error sense of the smoothed trajectories is proved, showing the validity of our proposed method. The methods are tested in a substantial application for the processing of speech signals represented by a time-varying autoregression and parameterised in terms of timevarying partial correlation coe#cients, comparing the results of our algorithm with those from a simple smoother based upon the filtered trajectories.