In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for the identification of Hammerstein systems. Adopting a Bayesian approach, we model the impulse response of the unknown linear dynamic system as a realization of a zero-mean Gaussian process. The covariance matrix (or kernel) of this process is given by the recently introduced stable-spline kernel, which encodes information on the stability and regularity of the impulse response. The static nonlinearity of the model is identified using an Empirical Bayes approach-that is, by maximizing the output marginal likelihood, which is obtained by integrating out the unknown impulse response. The related optimization problem is solved adopting a novel iterative scheme based on the Expectation-Maximization method, where each iteration consists in a simple sequence of update rules. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method compares favorably with a standard algorithm for Hammerstein system identification.

The object of this paper is the identification of Hammerstein systems, which are dynamic systems consisting of a static nonlinearity and a linear time-invariant dynamic system in cascade. We assume that the nonlinear function can be described as a linear combination of p basis functions. We model the system dynamics by means of an np-dimensional vector. This vector, usually referred to as overparameterized vector, contains all the combinations between the nonlinearity coefficients and the first n samples of the impulse response of the linear block. The estimation of the overparameterized vector is performed with a new regularized kernel-based approach. To this end, we introduce a novel kernel tailored for overparameterized models, which yields estimates that can be uniquely decomposed as the combination of an impulse response and p coefficients of the static nonlinearity. As part of the work, we establish a clear connection between the proposed identification scheme and our recently developed nonparametric method based on the stable spline kernel.

We propose a nonparametric approach for the identification of Wiener systems. We model the impulse response of the linear block and the static nonlinearity using Gaussian processes. The hyperparameters of the Gaussian processes are estimated using an iterative algorithm based on stochastic approximation expectation maximization. In the iterations, we use elliptical slice sampling to approximate the posterior distribution of the impulse response and update the hyperparameter estimates. The same sampling is finally used to sample the posterior distribution and to compute point estimates. We compare the proposed approach with a parametric approach and a semi-parametric approach. In particular, we show that the proposed method has an advantage when a parametric model for the system is not readily available.

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In this contribution, we propose a kernel-based method for the identification of linear systems from noisy and incomplete input-output datasets. We model the impulse response of the system as a Gaussian process whose covariance matrix is given by the recently introduced stable spline kernel. We adopt an empirical Bayes approach to estimate the posterior distribution of the impulse response given the data. The noiseless and missing data samples, together with the kernel hyperparameters, are estimated maximizing the joint marginal likelihood of the input and output measurements. To compute the marginal-likelihood maximizer, we build a solution scheme based on the Expectation-Maximization method. Simulations on a benchmark dataset show the effectiveness of the method.