A Constraint Generation Approach to Learning Stable Linear Dynamical Systems

Stability is a desirable characteristic for linear dynamical systems, but it is often ignored by algorithms that learn these systems from data. We propose a novel method for learning stable linear dynamical systems: we formulate an approximation of the problem as a convex program, start with a solution to a relaxed version of the program, and incrementally add constraints to improve stability. Rather than continuing to generate constraints until we reach a feasible solution, we test stability at each step; because the convex program is only an approximation of the desired problem, this early stopping rule can yield a higher-quality solution. We apply our algorithm to the task of learning dynamic textures from image sequences as well as to modeling biosurveillance drug-sales data. The constraint generation approach leads to noticeable improvement in the quality of simulated sequences. We compare our method to those of Lacy and Bernstein [1, 2], with positive results in terms of accurac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: Sajid M. Siddiqi, Byron Boots, Geoffrey J. Gordon
• Keywords: Convex Program, Information Technology, Linear Dynamical Systems, NIPS 2007, Simulated Sequences