Formal Uncertainty Propagation for Stochastic Dynamical Systems with Additive Noise

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Adams, Steven, Figueiredo, Eduardo, Laurenti, Luca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Adams, Steven
Figueiredo, Eduardo
Laurenti, Luca
author_facet Adams, Steven
Figueiredo, Eduardo
Laurenti, Luca
contents In this paper, we consider discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with additive process noise in which both the initial state and noise distributions are uncertain. Our goal is to quantify how the uncertainty in these distributions is propagated by the system dynamics for possibly infinite time steps. In particular, we model the uncertainty over input and noise as ambiguity sets of probability distributions close in the $ρ$-Wasserstein distance and aim to quantify how these sets evolve over time. Our approach relies on results from quantization theory, optimal transport, and stochastic optimization to construct ambiguity sets of distributions centered at mixture of Gaussian distributions that are guaranteed to contain the true sets for both finite and infinite prediction time horizons. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our framework in various benchmarks from the control and machine learning literature, showing how our approach can efficiently and formally quantify the uncertainty in linear and non-linear stochastic dynamical systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11219
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Formal Uncertainty Propagation for Stochastic Dynamical Systems with Additive Noise
Adams, Steven
Figueiredo, Eduardo
Laurenti, Luca
Systems and Control
In this paper, we consider discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with additive process noise in which both the initial state and noise distributions are uncertain. Our goal is to quantify how the uncertainty in these distributions is propagated by the system dynamics for possibly infinite time steps. In particular, we model the uncertainty over input and noise as ambiguity sets of probability distributions close in the $ρ$-Wasserstein distance and aim to quantify how these sets evolve over time. Our approach relies on results from quantization theory, optimal transport, and stochastic optimization to construct ambiguity sets of distributions centered at mixture of Gaussian distributions that are guaranteed to contain the true sets for both finite and infinite prediction time horizons. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our framework in various benchmarks from the control and machine learning literature, showing how our approach can efficiently and formally quantify the uncertainty in linear and non-linear stochastic dynamical systems.
title Formal Uncertainty Propagation for Stochastic Dynamical Systems with Additive Noise
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11219