@ARTICLE\{IMM2006-04680, author = "J. Ferkinghoff-Borg and T. Lehn-Schi{\o}ler and O. Winther", title = "{MCMC} for On-line Filtering: The Particle Path Filter", year = "2006", keywords = "State-space models, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, particle filters, path sampling, mean first passage-time", journal = "", volume = "", editor = "", number = "", publisher = "", url = "http://www2.compute.dtu.dk/pubdb/pubs/4680-full.html", abstract = "We propose a novel Monte Carlo (MC) method for on-line filtering of dynamical state-space models called the particle path filter (PPF). The main new feature of the method is the use of a proposal distribution that exploits two key feature of Markovian systems: The decomposability of the posterior probability of the latent variables and the exponential decaying time correlations of the variables. With this proposal distribution, the whole \{\$\backslash\$em path of variables affecting the present\} is sampled. This should be contrasted with two extremes: Traditional Markov chain {MC} (MCMC) for filtering draws samples from the latent variables across the whole time-series and particle filters (PFs) only drawing samples at the current time step. In both cases knowledge about the correlations is ignored leading to slow convergence of the Markov chain. We test and compare the {PPF} with state-of-the-art PFs for two generic 1d dynamical systems with two attractive fix points emphasizing the importance of using correlation time information. For filtering of systems with very short correlation times PFs outperform {PPF} in terms of the required particles to reach a given accuracy. For systems with long correlations {PPF} outperforms PFs with orders of magnitude." }