Particle Filter

In statistics, a particle filter, also known as a sequential Monte Carlo method (SMC), is a sophisticated model estimation technique based on simulation. Particle filters are usually used to estimate Bayesian models in which the latent variables are connected in a Markov chain — similar to a hidden Markov model (HMM), but typically where the state space of the latent variables is continuous rather than discrete, and not sufficiently restricted to make exact inference tractable (as, for example, in a linear dynamical system, where the state space of the latent variables is restricted to Gaussian distributions and hence exact inference can be done efficiently using a Kalman filter). In the context of HMMs and related models, "filtering" refers to determining the distribution of a latent variable at a specific time, given all observations up to that time; particle filters are so named because they allow for approximate "filtering" (in the sense just given) using a set of "particles" (differently weighted samples of the distribution).

Particle filters are the sequential (online) analogue of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) batch methods and are often similar to importance sampling methods. Well-designed particle filters can often be much faster than MCMC. They are often an alternative to the Extended Kalman filter (EKF) or unscented Kalman filter (UKF) with the advantage that, with sufficient samples, they approach the Bayesian optimal estimate, so they can be made more accurate than either the EKF or UKF. However, when the simulated sample is not sufficiently large, they might suffer from sample impoverishment. The approaches can also be combined by using a version of the Kalman filter as a proposal distribution for the particle filter.

Compared with MCMC methods, particle filters estimate only the distribution of only one of the latent variables at a time, rather than attempting to estimate them all at once, and produce a set of weighted samples, rather than a (usually much larger) set of unweighted samples.

Particle filters have important applications in econometrics, and in other fields.