Guidance for twisted particle filter: a continuous-time perspective

Abstract

The particle filter (PF), also known as the sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), is designed to approximate high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants in the discrete-time setting. To reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo approximation, several twisted particle filters (TPF) have been proposed by researchers, where one chooses or learns a twisting function that modifies the Markov transition kernel. In this paper, we study the TPF from a continuous-time perspective. Under suitable settings, we show that the discrete-time model converges to a continuous-time limit, which can be solved through a series of well-studied control-based importance sampling algorithms. This discrete-continuous connection allows the design of new TPF algorithms inspired by established continuous-time algorithms. As a concrete example, guided by existing importance sampling algorithms in the continuous-time setting, we propose a novel algorithm called ``Twisted-Path Particle Filter" (TPPF), where the twist function, parameterized by neural networks, minimizes specific KL-divergence between path measures. Some numerical experiments are given to illustrate the capability of the proposed algorithm.