Interpretable Gradient Descent for Kalman Gain

Abstract

We derive a decomposition for the gradient of the innovation loss with respect to the filter gain in a linear time-invariant system, decomposing as a product of an observability Gramian and a term quantifying the ``non-orthogonality" between the estimation error and the innovation. We leverage this decomposition to give a convergence proof of gradient descent to the optimal Kalman gain, specifically identifying how recovery of the Kalman gain depends on a non-standard observability condition, and obtaining an interpretable geometric convergence rate.