Kalman filtering with adversarial corruptions

Here we revisit the classic problem of linear quadratic estimation, i.e. estimating the trajectory of a linear dynamical system from noisy measurements. The celebrated Kalman filter gives an optimal estimator when the measurement noise is Gaussian, but is widely known to break down when one deviates from this assumption, e.g. when the noise is heavy-tailed. Many ad hoc heuristics have been employed in practice for dealing with outliers. In a pioneering work, Schick and Mitter gave provable guarantees when the measurement noise is a known infinitesimal perturbation of a Gaussian and raised the important question of whether one can get similar guarantees for large and unknown perturbations.