Error surfaces of recursive adaptive filters

For an adaptive filter with N adjustable coefficients or weights, the "error surface" is a plot, in N + 1 dimensions, of the mean-squared error versus the N coefficient values. If the adaptive filter is nonrecursive, the error surface is a quadratic function of the coefficients. With recursive adaptive filters, the error surface is not quadratic and may even have local minima. In this correspondence we discuss the nature of the recursive error surface and give examples of conditions under which local minima may exist. We conclude with a discussion of the effects of the nonquadratic error surface on gradient-search algorithms for recursive adaptive filters.