Score matching filters

Abstract

<p>A widely popular group of data assimilation methods in meteorological and geophysical sciences is formed by filters based on Monte-Carlo approximation of the traditional Kalman filter, e.g. <span>E</span><span>nsemble Kalman filter </span><span>(EnKF)</span><span>, </span><span>E</span><span>nsemble </span><span>s</span><span>quare-root filter and others. Due to the computational cost, ensemble </span><span>size </span><span>is </span><span>usually </span><span>small </span><span>compar</span><span>ed</span><span> to the dimension of the </span><span>s</span><span>tate </span><span>vector. </span><span>Traditional </span> <span>EnKF implicitly uses the sample covariance which is</span><span> a poor estimate of the </span><span>background covariance matrix - singular and </span><span>contaminated by </span><span>spurious correlations. </span></p><p><span>W</span><span>e focus on modelling the </span><span>background </span><span>covariance matrix by means of </span><span>a linear model for its inverse. This is </span><span>particularly </span><span>useful</span> <span>in</span><span> Gauss-Markov random fields (GMRF), </span><span>where</span> <span>the inverse covariance matrix has </span><span>a banded </span><span>structure</span><span>. </span><span>The parameters of the model are estimated by the</span><span> score matching </span><span>method which </span><span>provides</span><span> estimators in a closed form</span><span>, cheap to compute</span><span>. The resulting estimate</span><span> is a key component of the </span><span>proposed </span><span>ensemble filtering algorithms. </span><span>Under the assumption that the state vector is a GMRF in every time-step, t</span><span>he Score matching filter with Gaussian resamplin</span><span>g (SMF-GR) </span><span>gives</span><span> in every time-step a consistent (in the large ensemble limit) estimator of mean and covariance matrix </span><span>of the forecast and analysis distribution</span><span>. Further, we propose a filtering method called Score matching ensemble filter (SMEF), based on regularization of the EnK</span><span>F</span><span>. Th</span><span>is</span><span> filter performs well even for non-Gaussian systems with non-linear dynamic</span><span>s</span><span>. </span><span>The performance of both filters is illustrated on a simple linear convection model and Lorenz-96.</span></p>