Kasper Bågmark

Kasper Bågmark, Filip Rydin

In this work, we systematically benchmark two recently developed deep density methods for nonlinear filtering. We model the filtering density of a discretely observed stochastic differential equation through the associated Fokker--Planck equation, coupled with Bayesian updates at discrete observation times. The two filters: the deep splitting filter and the deep backward stochastic differential equation filter, are both based on Feynman--Kac formulas, Euler--Maruyama discretizations and neural networks. The two methods are extended to logarithmic formulations providing sound, robust, and positivity-preserving density approximations in increasing state dimension. Comparing to the classical bootstrap particle filter and an ensemble Kalman filter, we benchmark the methods on numerous examples. In the low-dimensional examples the particle filters work well, but when we scale up to a partially observed $100$-dimensional Lorenz-96 model, the particle-based methods fail and the logarithmic deep backward stochastic differential equation filter prevails. In terms of computational efficiency, the deep density methods reduce inference time by roughly two to five orders of magnitude relative to the particle-based filters.

Kasper Bågmark, Adam Andersson, Stig Larsson et al.

A numerical scheme for approximating the nonlinear filtering density is introduced and its convergence rate is established, theoretically under a parabolic Hörmander condition, and empirically in numerical examples. In a prediction step, between the noisy and partial measurements at discrete times, the scheme approximates the Fokker--Planck equation with a deep splitting scheme, followed by an exact update through Bayes' formula. This results in a classical prediction-update filtering algorithm that operates online for new observation sequences post-training. The algorithm employs a sampling-based Feynman--Kac approach, designed to mitigate the curse of dimensionality. As a corollary we obtain the convergence rate for the approximation of the Fokker--Planck equation alone, disconnected from the filtering problem. The convergence analysis is complemented by a nonlinear $10$-dimensional numerical example demonstrating the robustness of the method.

Kasper Bågmark, Adam Andersson, Stig Larsson

A novel approximate Bayesian filter based on backward stochastic differential equations is introduced. It uses a nonlinear Feynman--Kac representation of the filtering problem and the approximation of an unnormalized filtering density using the well-known deep BSDE method and neural networks. The method is trained offline, which means that it can be applied online with new observations. A hybrid a priori-a posteriori error bound is proved under a parabolic Hörmander condition. The theoretical convergence rate is confirmed in two numerical examples.