Probing robustness of nonlinear filter stability numerically using Sinkhorn divergence

Abstract: Using the recently developed Sinkhorn algorithm for approximating the Wasserstein distance between probability distributions represented by Monte Carlo samples, we demonstrate exponential filter stability of two commonly used nonlinear filtering algorithms, namely, the particle filter and the ensemble Kalman filter, for deterministic dynamical systems. We also establish numerically a relation between filter stability and filter convergence by showing that the Wasserstein distance between filters with two different initial conditions is proportional to the bias or the RMSE of the filter.