On local likelihood asymptotics for Gaussian mixed-effects model with system noise

Abstract: The Gaussian mixed-effects model driven by a stationary integrated Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process has been used for analyzing longitudinal data having an explicit and simple serial-correlation structure in each individual. However, the theoretical aspect of its asymptotic inference is yet to be elucidated. We prove the local asymptotics for the associated log-likelihood function, which in particular guarantees the asymptotic optimality of the suitably chosen maximum-likelihood estimator. We illustrate the obtained asymptotic normality result through some simulations for both balanced and unbalanced datasets.