Switching Recurrent Kalman Networks

Forecasting driving behavior or other sensor measurements is an essential component of autonomous driving systems. Often real-world multivariate time series data is hard to model because the underlying dynamics are nonlinear and the observations are noisy. In addition, driving data can often be multimodal in distribution, meaning that there are distinct predictions that are likely, but averaging can hurt model performance. To address this, we propose the Switching Recurrent Kalman Network (SRKN) for efficient inference and prediction on nonlinear and multimodal time-series data. The model switches among several Kalman filters that model different aspects of the dynamics in a factorized latent state. We empirically test the resulting scalable and interpretable deep state-space model on toy data sets and real driving data from taxis in Porto. In all cases, the model can capture the multimodal nature of the dynamics in the data.