The first order stable spline (SS-1) kernel (also known as the tunedcorrelated kernel) is used extensively in regularized system identification, where the impulse response is modeled as a zero-mean Gaussian process whose covariance function is given by well designed and tuned kernels. In this paper, we discuss the maximum entropy properties of this kernel. In particular, we formulate the exact maximum entropy problem solved by the SS-1 kernel without Gaussian and uniform sampling assumptions. Under general sampling assumption, we also derive the special structure of the SS-1 kernel (e.g. its tridiagonal inverse and factorization have closed form expression), also giving to it a maximum entropy covariance completion interpretation.

We present an adaptive smoother for linear state-space models with unknown process and measurement noise covariances. The proposed method utilizes the variational Bayes technique to perform approximate inference. The resulting smoother is computationally efficient, easy to implement, and can be applied to high dimensional linear systems. The performance of the algorithm is illustrated on a target tracking example.

Filtering and smoothing algorithms for linear discrete-time state-space models with skewed and heavy-tailed measurement noise are presented. The algorithms use a variational Bayes approximation of the posterior distribution of models that have normal prior and skew-t-distributed measurement noise. The proposed filter and smoother are compared with conventional low-complexity alternatives in a simulated pseudorange positioning scenario. In the simulations the proposed methods achieve better accuracy than the alternative methods, the computational complexity of the filter being roughly 5 to 10 times that of the Kalman filter.

In this paper, a Bayesian inference technique based on Taylor series approximation of the logarithm of the likelihood function is presented. The proposed approximation is devised for the case where the prior distribution belongs to the exponential family of distributions. The logarithm of the likelihood function is linearized with respect to the sufficient statistic of the prior distribution in exponential family such that the posterior obtains the same exponential family form as the prior. Similarities between the proposed method and the extended Kalman filter for nonlinear filtering are illustrated. Further, an extended target measurement update for target models where the target extent is represented by a random matrix having an inverse Wishart distribution is derived. The approximate update covers the important case where the spread of measurement is due to the target extent as well as the measurement noise in the sensor.

In this letter, we propose a general framework for greedy reduction of mixture densities of exponential family. The performances of the generalized algorithms are illustrated both on an artificial example where randomly generated mixture densities are reduced and on a target tracking scenario where the reduction is carried out in the recursion of a Gaussian inverse Wishart probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter.