Robust continuous-time smoothers without two-sided stochastic integrals

Abstract

We consider the problem of fixed-interval smoothing of a continuous-time partially observed nonlinear stochastic dynamical system. Existing results for such smoothers require the use of two-sided stochastic calculus. The main contribution of the paper is to present a robust formulation of the smoothing equations. Under this robust formulation, the smoothing equations are nonstochastic parabolic partial differential equations (with random coefficients) and, hence, the technical machinery associated with two sided stochastic calculus is not required. Furthermore, the robust smoothed state estimates are locally Lipschitz in the observations, which is useful for numerical simulation. As examples, finite dimensional robust versions of the Benes and hidden Markov model smoothers and smoothers for piecewise linear dynamics are derived; these finite-dimensional smoothers do not involve stochastic integrals.