The topic of statistical inference for dynamical systems has been studied extensively across several fields. In this survey we focus on the problem of parameter estimation for non-linear dynamical systems. Our objective is to place results across distinct disciplines in a common setting and highlight opportunities for further research.

"We present a framework for obtaining explicit bounds on the rate of convergence to equilibrium of a Markov chain on a general state space, with respect to both total variation and Wasserstein distances. For Wasserstein bounds, our main tool is Steinsaltz's convergence theorem for locally contractive random dynamical systems. We describe practical methods for finding Steinsaltz's "drift functions" that prove local contractivity. We then use the idea of "one-shot coupling" to derive criteria that give bounds for total variation distances in terms of Wasserstein distances. Our methods are applied to two examples: a two-component Gibbs sampler for the Normal distribution and a random logistic dynamical system."

""We survey an area of recent development, relating dynamics to theoretical computer science. We discuss the theoretical limits of simulation and computation of interesting quantities in dynamical systems. We will focus on central objects of the theory of dynamics, as invariant measures and invariant sets, showing that even if they can be computed with arbitrary precision in many interesting cases, there exists some cases in which they can not. We also explain how it is possible to compute the speed of convergence of ergodic averages (when the system is known exactly) and how this entails the computation of arbitrarily good approximations of points of the space having typical statistical behaviour (a sort of constructive version of the pointwise ergodic theorem).""

"This paper presents a self-contained account for coupling arguments and applications in the context of Markov processes. We first use coupling to describe the transport problem, which leads to the concepts of optimal coupling and probability distance (or transportation-cost), then introduce applications of coupling to the study of ergodicity, Liouville theorem, convergence rate, gradient estimate, and Harnack inequality for Markov processes."

Terry Tao discusses the work of the four 2010 Fields medal winners.

Yay, a 2nd edition of Robert Gray's excellent text!

"We show that the sets in a family with finite VC dimension can be uniformly approximated within a given error by a finite partition. Immediate corollaries include the fact that VC classes have finite bracketing numbers, satisfy uniform laws of averages under strong dependence, and exhibit uniform mixing. Our results are based on recent work concerning uniform laws of averages for VC classes under ergodic sampling."

Sounds exciting: "We develop necessary and sufficient conditions for uniqueness of the invariant measure of the filtering process associated to an ergodic hidden Markov model in a finite or countable state space. These results provide a complete solution to a problem posed by Blackwell (1957), and subsume earlier partial results due to Kaijser, Kochman and Reeds. The proofs of our main results are based on the stability theory of nonlinear filters."

Terry Tao's course on ergodic theory. Mmmmmm, measure-preserving...