IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol.47, No.11, 1945-1948, 2002
Existence and uniqueness of risk-sensitive estimates
Risk-sensitive criteria have been used to derive robust filters, identifiers, and controllers. The fundamental issues of existence and uniqueness of an estimate of a random variable given a random vector with respect to an order-(lambda, p) risk-sensitive criterion are studied in this note. More precisely, we prove the existence of a unique risk-sensitive estimate provided lambda > 0 and p > 1. For the remaining cases, a general existence result is not available at this time. We do, however, prove the existence in certain special cases. Moreover, we present examples with uncountably many optimal risk-sensitive estimates, i.e., exhibiting an extremely high level of nonuniqueness.