Blind maximum likelihood identification of Hammerstein systems

This paper is about the identification of discrete-time Hammerstein systems from output measurements only (blind identification). Assuming that the unobserved input is white Gaussian noise, that the static nonlinearity is invertible, and that the output is observed without errors, a Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator is constructed. Its asymptotic properties are analyzed and the Cramér–Rao lower bound is calculated. In practice, the latter can be computed accurately without using the strong law of large numbers. A two-step procedure is described that allows to find high quality initial estimates to start up the iterative Gauss–Newton based optimization scheme. The paper includes the illustration of the method on a simulation example. A theoretical analysis demonstrates that additive output measurement noise introduces a bias that is proportional to the variance of that additive, unmodeled noise source. The simulations support this result, and show that this bias is insignificant beyond a certain Signal-to-Noise Ratio (40 dB in the example).