An Expectation-Maximization Algorithm for Continuous-time Hidden Markov Models

Abstract: We propose a unified framework that extends the inference methods for classical hidden Markov models to continuous settings, where both the hidden states and observations occur in continuous time. Two different settings are analyzed: hidden jump process with a finite state space, and hidden diffusion process with a continuous state space. For each setting, we first estimate the hidden states given the observations and model parameters, showing that the posterior distribution of the hidden states can be described by differential equations in continuous time. We then consider the estimation of unknown model parameters, deriving the continuous-time formulas for the expectation-maximization algorithm. We also propose a Monte Carlo method based on the continuous formulation, sampling the posterior distribution of the hidden states and updating the parameter estimation.