The celebrated Kalman filter, rooted in the state

The celebrated Kalman filter, rooted in the state-space formulation or linear dynamical systems, provides a recursive solution to the linear optimal filtering problem. It applies to stationary as well as nonstationary environments. The solution is recursive in that each updated estimate of the state is computed from the previous estimate and the new input data, so only the previous estimate requires storage. In addition to eliminating the need for storing the entire 1 past observed data, the Kalman filter is computationally more efficient than computing the estimate directly from the entire past observed data at each step of the filtering process.