A Particle Filtering Scheme for Processing Time Series Corrupted by Outliers

The literature in engineering and statistics is abounding in techniques for detecting and properly processing anomalous observations in the data. Most of these techniques have been developed in the framework of static models and it is only in recent years that we have seen attempts that address the presence of outliers in nonlinear time series. For a target tracking problem described by a nonlinear state-space model, we propose the online detection of outliers by including an outlier detection step within the standard particle filtering algorithm. The outlier detection step is implemented by a test involving a statistic of the predictive distribution of the observations, such as a concentration measure or an extreme upper quantile. We also provide asymptotic results about the convergence of the particle approximations of the predictive distribution (and its statistics) and assess the performance of the resulting algorithms by computer simulations of target tracking problems with signal power observations.