Semi-Supervised Model-Free Bayesian State Estimation from Compressed Measurements

We consider data-driven Bayesian state estimation from compressed measurements (BSCM) of a model-free process. The dimension of the temporal measurement vector is lower than that of the temporal state vector to be estimated, leading to an under-determined inverse problem. The underlying dynamical model of the state’s evolution is unknown for a ‘model-free process.’ Hence, it is difficult to use traditional model-driven methods, for example, Kalman and particle filters. Instead, we consider data-driven methods. We experimentally show that two existing unsupervised learning-based data-driven methods fail to address the BSCM problem in a model-free process. The methods are – data-driven nonlinear state estimation (DANSE) and deep Markov model (DMM). While DANSE provides good predictive/forecasting performance to model the temporal measurement data as a time series, its unsupervised learning lacks suitable regularization for tackling the BSCM task. We then propose a semi-supervised learning approach and develop a semi-supervised learning-based DANSE method, referred to as SemiDANSE. In SemiDANSE, we use a large amount of unlabelled data along with a limited amount of labelled data, i.e., pairwise measurement-and-state data, which provides the desired regularization. Using benchmark chaotic dynamical systems, we empirically show that the data-driven SemiDANSE provides competitive state estimation performance for BSCM using a handful of different measurement systems, against a hybrid method called KalmanNet and two model-driven methods (extended Kalman filter and unscented Kalman filter) that know the dynamical models exactly.