  We cast Amari's natural gradient in statistical learning as a specific case
of Kalman filtering. Namely, applying an extended Kalman filter to estimate a
fixed unknown parameter of a probabilistic model from a series of observations,
is rigorously equivalent to estimating this parameter via an online stochastic
natural gradient descent on the log-likelihood of the observations.
  In the i.i.d. case, this relation is a consequence of the "information
filter" phrasing of the extended Kalman filter. In the recurrent (state space,
non-i.i.d.) case, we prove that the joint Kalman filter over states and
parameters is a natural gradient on top of real-time recurrent learning (RTRL),
a classical algorithm to train recurrent models.
  This exact algebraic correspondence provides relevant interpretations for
natural gradient hyperparameters such as learning rates or initialization and
regularization of the Fisher information matrix.
