Designing Proposal Distributions for Particle Filters using Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation
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State-space models are used to describe and analyse dynamical systems. They are ubiquitously used in many scientific fields such as signal processing, finance and ecology to name a few. Particle filters are popular inferential methods used for state-space methods. Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA), an approximate Bayesian inference method, can also be used for this kind of models in case the transition distribution is Gaussian. We present a way to use this framework in order to approximate the particle filter's proposal distribution that incorporates information about the observations, parameters and the previous latent variables. Further, we demonstrate the performance of this proposal on data simulated from a Poisson state-space model used for count data. We also show how INLA can be used to estimate the parameters of certain state-space models (a task that is often challenging) that would be used for Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms.
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