Tracking of Dynamical Processes with Model Switching Using Temporal Convolutional Networks
Arick Grootveld, Vlad I. Bugayev, Leah Lackey, Andrew G. Klein, Kirty Vedula, Donald R. Brown · 2021
This paper considers the problem of tracking and predicting dynamical processes with model switching. The classical approach to this problem has been to use an interacting multiple model (IMM) which uses multiple Kalman filters and an auxiliary system to estimate the posterior probability of each model given the observations. More recently, data-driven approaches such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used for tracking and prediction in a variety of settings. An advantage of data-driven approaches like the RNN is that they can be trained to provide good performance even when the underlying dynamic models are unknown. This paper studies the use of temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) in this setting since TCNs are also data-driven but have certain structural advantages over RNNs. Numerical simulations demonstrate that a TCN matches or exceeds the performance of an IMM and other classical tracking methods in two specific settings with model switching: (i) a Gilbert-Elliott burst noise communication channel that switches between two different modes, each modeled as a linear system, and (ii) a maneuvering target tracking scenario where the target switches between a linear constant velocity mode and a nonlinear coordinated turn mode. In particular, the results show that the TCN tends to identify a mode switch as fast or faster than an IMM and that, in some cases, the TCN can perform almost as well as an omniscient Kalman filter with perfect knowledge of the current mode of the dynamical system.