Gauge Freedom within the Class of Linear Feedback Particle Filters

Abstract

Feedback particle filters (FPFs) are Monte-Carlo approximations of the solution of the filtering problem in continuous time. The samples or particles evolve according to a feedback control law in order to track the posterior distribution. However, it is known that by itself, the requirement to track the posterior does not lead to a unique algorithm. Given a particle filter, another one can be constructed by applying a time-dependent transformation of the particles that keeps the posterior distribution invariant. Here, we characterize this gauge freedom within the class of FPFs for the linear-Gaussian filtering problem, and thereby extend previously known parametrized families of linear FPFs.