Adaptive minimum bit-error-rate filtering

Adaptive filtering has traditionally been developed based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) principle and has found ever-increasing applications in communications. The paper develops adaptive filtering based on an alternative minimum bit error rate (MBER) criterion for communication applications. It is shown that the MBER filtering exploits the non-Gaussian distribution of filter output effectively and, consequently, can provide significant performance gain in terms of smaller bit error rate (BER) over the MMSE approach. Adopting the classical Parzen window or kernel density estimation for a probability density function (pdf), a block-data gradient adaptive MBER algorithm is derived. A stochastic gradient adaptive MBER algorithm is further developed for sample-by-sample adaptive implementation of the MBER filtering. Extension of the MBER approach to adaptive nonlinear filtering is also discussed.