Is It Still the Same Radar? Tracking Emitters Through Time

Every analytic product so far has been a snapshot, but an intercept is a frame in a film. The real question is continuity: is this the same emitter I saw ninety seconds ago, and has it changed what it is doing? We cover multi-hypothesis tracking — why you keep competing explanations alive instead of committing, how log-likelihood ratios accumulate and decay, and the lifecycle that confirms or drops a hypothesis. Then a five-state hidden Markov model that reads mode transitions, where the transition matrix is doctrine written as numbers and a move to fire control is a warning, not a data point.