Efficient recursive state estimator for dynamic systems without knowledge of noise covariances

An efficient recursive state estimator for dynamic systems without knowledge of noise covariances is suggested. The basic idea for this estimator is to incorporate the dynamic matrix and the forgetting factor into the least squares (LS) method to remedy the lack of knowledge of noises. We call it the extended forgetting factor recursive least squares (EFRLS) estimator. This estimator is shown to have similar asymptotic properties to a completely specified Kalman filter state estimator. More importantly, the performance of EFRLS greatly exceeds that of existing filtering techniques when the noise variance is misspecified. In addition, EFRLS also performs well when there is cross-correlation between the process and measurement noise streams or temporal dependencies within those streams. Some discussions and a number of simulations are made to provide practical guidance on the choice of an optimal forgetting factor and evaluate the performance of the EFRLS algorithms, which strongly dominates that of the standard forgetting factor recursive least squares (FRLS) and some misspecified Kalman filtering.