A Tutorial on the Non-Asymptotic Theory of System Identification
It serves as an educational resource for researchers and practitioners in control theory and statistics, offering incremental insights by compiling and simplifying recent theoretical advances.
This tutorial introduces non-asymptotic methods for linear system identification, focusing on tools like covering techniques and self-normalized martingales to provide streamlined proofs for least-squares estimators in autoregressive models.
This tutorial serves as an introduction to recently developed non-asymptotic methods in the theory of -- mainly linear -- system identification. We emphasize tools we deem particularly useful for a range of problems in this domain, such as the covering technique, the Hanson-Wright Inequality and the method of self-normalized martingales. We then employ these tools to give streamlined proofs of the performance of various least-squares based estimators for identifying the parameters in autoregressive models. We conclude by sketching out how the ideas presented herein can be extended to certain nonlinear identification problems.