Bayesian filtering is one of the most common approach to address SLAM. EKF represents this filtering category, however if you are dealing with perceptual aliasing, particle filtering could help you in handling multi-hypotheses.
You should look at some publications by Dieter Fox, Udo Frese, Cyrill Stachniss (and their coauthors!!) and download some data from openSLAM.org to test your approach.
If you're looking for a breakthrough, I'll suggest you take a tour on "Fast SLAM" algorithm, is which considerably responsible for contribution of a novel family of the SLAM-based navigation strategies...