Some System Identification Challenges and Approaches

The field of control-oriented system identification is mature. Nevertheless, it is still very active. This is because there are many important unsolved challenges. Of these, this paper considers a selection. This involves considering the estimation of general nonlinear model structures, together with accurate error bounds, using methods that scale well to models of high dimension. A particular strength of the system identification field is that it has always actively sought to understand, embrace and develop ideas from other fields, such as statistics, mathematics and econometrics. This paper proposes a continuation of this successful strategy by proposing and profiling the adoption of new ideas originating in statistics, signal processing and statistical mechanics.