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Estimating a state-space model from point process observations: a note on convergence
1School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. ky08r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Abstract:
Physiological signals such as neural spikes and heartbeats are discrete events in time, driven by continuous underlying systems. A recently introduced data-driven model to analyze such a system is a state-space model with point process observations, parameters of which and the underlying state sequence are simultaneously identified in a maximum likelihood setting using the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. In this note, we observe some simple convergence properties of such a setting, previously un-noticed. Simulations show that the likelihood is unimodal in the unknown parameters, and hence the EM iterations are always able to find the globally optimal solution.
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