Using Optimal Mass Transport for Tracking and Interpolation of Toeplitz Covariance Matrices

In this work, we propose a novel method for interpolation and extrapolation of Toeplitz structured covariance matrices. By considering a spectral representation of Toeplitz matrices, we use an optimal mass transport problem in the spectral domain in order to define a notion of distance between such matrices. The obtained optimal transport plan naturally induces a way of interpolating, as well as extrapolating, Toeplitz matrices. The constructed covariance matrix interpolants and extrapolants preserve the Toeplitz structure, as well as the positive semi-definiteness and the zeroth covariance of the original matrices. We demonstrate the proposed method’s abil- ity to model locally linear shifts of spectral power for slowly varying stochastic processes, illustrating the achievable performance using a simple tracking problem.