Research areas

  • switching-state-estimation
  • Probabilistic graphical models, dynamic Bayesian networks
  • Bayesian machine learning, approximate inference
  • State-space models, hidden Markov models, switching Kalman filters
  • Author of Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective (MIT Press, 2012) and Probabilistic Machine Learning: An Introduction / Advanced Topics (MIT Press, 2022 / 2023) — three of the field’s standard graduate textbooks

Key papers

  • murphy-1998-switching-kalman-filters — unifies GPB1, GPB2, IMM, variational SKF, and MHT under a single moment-matching collapse + EM framework; the reference technical report on SKF inference and learning

Recent work

  • Probabilistic Machine Learning textbook series (MIT Press, 2022–2023)
  • Bayesian deep learning, sequential Monte Carlo, JAX-based probabilistic programming at Google DeepMind

Collaborators

  • Stuart Russell (PhD advisor, UC Berkeley)
  • Zoubin Ghahramani (collaborator on switching state-space models)
  • Geoffrey Hinton (Toronto / Google)

My notes

Murphy’s 1998 SKF tech report is the canonical “what is a switching Kalman filter and why is exact inference intractable” reference. Its taxonomy (collapsing / selection / sampling / variational) maps cleanly onto every modern switching-filter algorithm — including the Rao-Blackwellised particle filter used in SimMdlPrices/src/rbpf.jl (a selection-class member that keeps regime histories and runs an exact Kalman filter conditional on each path).