Joint learning of a network of linear dynamical systems via total variation penalization

Abstract: We consider the problem of joint estimation of the parameters of $m$ linear dynamical systems, given access to single realizations of their respective trajectories, each of length $T$. The linear systems are assumed to reside on the nodes of an undirected and connected graph $G = ([m], \mathcal{E})$, and the system matrices are assumed to either vary smoothly or exhibit small number of ``jumps'' across the edges. We consider a total variation penalized least-squares estimator and derive non-asymptotic bounds on the mean squared error (MSE) which hold with high probability. In particular, the bounds imply for certain choices of well connected $G$ that the MSE goes to zero as $m$ increases, even when $T$ is constant. The theoretical results are supported by extensive experiments on synthetic and real data.