Differentiable Particle Filtering using Optimal Placement Resampling

Abstract

Particle filters are a frequent choice for inference tasks in nonlinear and non-Gaussian state-space models. They can either be used for state inference by approximating the filtering distribution or for parameter inference by approximating the marginal data (observation) likelihood. A good proposal distribution and a good resampling scheme are crucial to obtain low variance estimates. However, traditional methods like multinomial resampling introduce nondifferentiability in PF-based loss functions for parameter estimation, prohibiting gradient-based learning tasks. This work proposes a differentiable resampling scheme by deterministic sampling from an empirical cumulative distribution function. We evaluate our method on parameter inference tasks and proposal learning.