Observed Fisher Information in hidden Markov models - Application to a noisy Gaussian random walk

Abstract

In this work we provide analytical and closed-form expressions for the exact computation of the score and the observed Fisher information matrix in a Gaussian random walk observed through Gaussian noise. Our method is based on the Oakes' identity and, as for the computation of the log-likelihood, its complexity in time is linear in the length of the sequence with the forward-backward (or Baum-Welch) algorithm. We illustrate the method over various simulation studies and provide parameter estimates computed with the Newton-Raphson algorithm along with confidence intervals.