On the Oja-Flow-Based Low-Rank Approximation of Kalman-Bucy Filters for Linear Time-Varying Systems

Abstract

This paper studies a low-rank Kalman-Bucy filtering framework for linear time-varying systems through the tracking analysis of Oja's principal component flow. Under structured assumptions on the eigenspaces and their time variation, we show that the Oja flow can remain in a neighborhood of the time-varying dominant subspace by tuning a parameter of the flow, rather than tracking it exactly. These restrictive assumptions identify a tractable class of linear time-varying systems and provide a theoretical basis for low-rank filtering, as illustrated by a numerical experiment.