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Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python
Kalman Filter book using Jupyter Notebook. Focuses on building intuition and experience, not formal proofs. Includes Kalman filters,extended Kalman filters, unscented Kalman filters, particle filters, and more. All exercises include solutions.
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If I really needed a Kalman filter I'm sure I could read this, or the Wikipedia page, or an implementation's source code (https://github.com/LdDl/kalman-rs/blob/master/src/kalman/kal...) and figure it out.
But IME everyone in the entire world is a "visual learner" who learns best by examples. So I'm surprised that the tutorial midway through the page doesn't put any example numbers into the formulas (maybe I glanced over it?) and the pictures only start after a page of "what is a Kalman filter" text, and the pictures are just of more formulas.
No thread on Kalman Filters is complete without a link to this excellent learning resource, a book written as a set of Jupyter notebooks:
https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...
That book mentions alpha-beta filters as sort of a younger sibling to full-blown Kalman filters. I recently had need of something like this at work, and started doing a bunch of reading. Eventually I realized that alpha-beta filters (and the whole Kalman family) is very focused on predicting the near future, whereas what I really needed was just a way to smooth historical data.
So I started reading in that direction, came across "double exponential smoothing" which seemed perfect for my use-case, and as I went into it I realized... it's just the alpha-beta filter again, but now with different names for all the variables :(
I can't help feeling like this entire neighborhood of math rests on a few common fundamental theories, but because different disciplines arrived at the same systems via different approaches, they end up sounding a little different and the commonality is obscured. Something about power series, Euler's number, gradient descent, filters, feedback systems, general system theory... it feels to me like there's a relatively small kernel of intuitive understanding at the heart of all that stuff, which could end up making glorious sense of a lot of mathematics if I could only grasp it.
Somebody help me out, here!
No thread on Kalman Filters is complete without a link to this excellent learning resource, a book written as a set of Jupyter notebooks:
https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...
That book mentions alpha-beta filters as sort of a younger sibling to full-blown Kalman filters. I recently had need of something like this at work, and started doing a bunch of reading. Eventually I realized that alpha-beta filters (and the whole Kalman family) is very focused on predicting the near future, whereas what I really needed was just a way to smooth historical data.
So I started reading in that direction, came across "double exponential smoothing" which seemed perfect for my use-case, and as I went into it I realized... it's just the alpha-beta filter again, but now with different names for all the variables :(
I can't help feeling like this entire neighborhood of math rests on a few common fundamental theories, but because different disciplines arrived at the same systems via different approaches, they end up sounding a little different and the commonality is obscured. Something about power series, Euler's number, gradient descent, filters, feedback systems, general system theory... it feels to me like there's a relatively small kernel of intuitive understanding at the heart of all that stuff, which could end up making glorious sense of a lot of mathematics if I could only grasp it.
Somebody help me out, here!