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The R package LaMa
provides convenient R wrapper
functions for the forward algorithm that can be used to
fit a wide range of latent Markov models like
hidden Markov models (HMMs), hidden semi-Markov
models (HSMMs) and state space models (SSMs)
via direct numerical maximum likelihood estimation. To
make writing bespoke likelihood functions faster and more convenient, it
also includes many auxiliary functions that to be used in the likelihood
computation.
The three main families of functions therefore are
forward
, tpm
and stationary
and
we showcasse the simplest versions in the following introductory
example.
In this vignette, we start from the most simple HMM we can think of. Such a basic \(N\)-state HMM is a doubly stochastic process in discrete time, i.e. in such a model observations are generated by one of \(N\) possible distributions \(f_j(x_t)\), \(j = 1, \dots N\) with an unobserved \(N\)-state Markov chain selecting which distribution is active at any given time point. Therefore, HMMs can be interpreted as correlated mixture models and are very popular accross a wide range of disciplines like ecology, sports, finance where time-series data with underlying sequential dependencies are to be analyzed. They statements above already hint at the two main assumptions in such a model, namely
The hidden state process is described by a Markov chain, as such a
stochastic process can easily be characterized by its initial
distribution \[\delta^{(1)} =
(\Pr(S_1 = 1), \dots, \Pr(S_1 = N))\] and the one-step
transition probabilities \[\gamma_{ij} = \Pr(S_t = j \mid S_{t-1} = i),
\quad i,j = 1, \dotsc, N\] which are typically summarized in the
so-called transition probability matrix (t.p.m.) \[\Gamma = (\gamma_{ij})_{i,j = 1, \dots,
N}\] where row \(i\) is the
conditional one-step ahead distribution of the state process given that
the current state is \(i\). For HMMs
with homogeneous transition probabilities, we often assume
stationarity of the underlying Markov chain, as
well-behaved Markov chains converge to a unique stationary distribution.
When we e.g. observe an animial and model its behavioral states by a
Markov chain, it is reasonable to assume that the chain has been running
for a long time prior to our observation and thus already converged to
its stationary distribution. This distribution (which we call \(\delta\)) can be computed by solving the
system of equations \[
\delta \Gamma = \delta, \quad \text{s.t.} \; \sum_{j=1}^N \delta_j = 1,
\] which is implemented in the function
stationary()
. For stationary HMMs, we then replace the
initial distribution \(\delta^{(1)}\)
by this stationary distribution.
For the conditional distributions of the observations \(f_j(x_t)\), a typical choice would be some kind of parametric family like normal or gamma distributions with state-specific means and standard deviations. For a more exhaustive description of such models see Zucchini, MacDonald, and Langrock (2016).
Here we can already use stationary()
to compute the
stationary distribution.
# parameters
mu = c(0, 6)
sigma = c(2, 4)
Gamma = matrix(c(0.95, 0.05, 0.15, 0.85), nrow = 2, byrow = TRUE)
delta = stationary(Gamma) # stationary HMM
# simulation
n = 1000
set.seed(123)
s = x = rep(NA, n)
s[1] = sample(1:2, 1, prob = delta)
x[1] = rnorm(1, mu[s[1]], sigma[s[1]])
for(t in 2:n){
# we draw the next state conditional on the last one
s[t] = sample(1:2, 1, prob = Gamma[s[t-1],])
# we draw the observation conditional on the current state
x[t] = rnorm(1, mu[s[t]], sigma[s[t]])
}
color = c("orange", "deepskyblue")
plot(x[1:200], bty = "n", pch = 20, ylab = "x",
col = color[s[1:200]])
Inference for HMMs is more difficult compared to e.g. regression modeling, as the observations are not independent. We would like to estimate model parameters via maximum likelihood estimation, due to the nice properties possessed by the maximum likelihood estimator. However, computing the HMM likelihood for observed data points \(x_1, \dots, x_T\) is not a trivial task, as we do not observe the underlying states. We thus need to sum out all possible state sequences which would be infeasible for general state processes. We can, however, exploit the Markov property and thus calculate the likelihood recursively as a matrix product using the so-called forward algorithm. In closed form, the HMM likelihood then becomes
\[
L(\theta) = \delta^{(1)} P(x_1) \Gamma P(x_2) \Gamma \dots \Gamma P(x_T)
1^t,
\] where \(\delta^{(1)}\) and
\(\Gamma\) are as defined above, \(P(x_t)\) is a diagonal matrix with
state-dependent densities or probability mass functions \(f_j(x_t) = f(x_t \mid S_t = j)\) on its
diagonal and \(1\) is a row vector of
ones with length \(N\). All model
parameters are here summarized in the vector \(\theta\). Being able to evaluate the
likelihood function, it can be numerically maximized by popular
optimizers like nlm()
or optim()
.
The algorithm explained above suffers from numerical underflow and
for \(T\) only moderately large the
likelihood is rounded to zero. Thus, one can use a scaling strategy,
detailed by Zucchini, MacDonald, and Langrock (2016), to avoid this and calculate the
log-likelihood recursively. This version of the forward algorithm is
implemented in LaMa
and written in C++. For HMMs we often
need to constrain the domains of several of the model parameters in
\(\theta\) (i.e. positive standard
deviations or a transition probability matrix with elements between 0
and 1 and rows that sum to one). One could now resort to contraint
numerical optimziation but in practice one usually maximizes the
likelihood w.r.t. a transformed version (to the real number line) of the
model parameters by using suitable invertible and differenentiable link
functions, which we denote here as \(\theta^*\) (also in the code). For example
we use the log-link for parameters that need to be strictly positive and
the multinomial logistic link for the transition probability matrix.
While the former can easily be coded by hand, the latter is implemented
by the functions tpm()
and tpm_g()
for
convenience and computational speed. For efficiency, it is also
advisable to evaluate the state-dependent densities (or probability mass
functions) vectorized outside the recursive forward algorithm. This
results in a matrix containing the state-dependent likelihoods for each
data point conditioned on each state (i.e. of dimension
c(n,N)
) which, throughout the package, we call the
allprobs
matrix.
In this example, within the negative log-likelihood function we build
the homogeneous transition probability matrix using the
tpm()
function and compute the stationary distribution of
the Markov chain using stationary()
. We then build the
allprobs
matrix and calculate the log-likelihood using
forward()
in the last line. It is returned negative such
that the function can be numerically minimized by
e.g. nlm()
.
mllk = function(theta.star, x){
# parameter transformations for unconstraint optimization
Gamma = LaMa::tpm(theta.star[1:2])
delta = LaMa::stationary(Gamma) # stationary HMM
mu = theta.star[3:4]
sigma = exp(theta.star[5:6])
# calculate all state-dependent probabilities outside the forward algorithm
allprobs = matrix(1, length(x), 2)
for(j in 1:2){ allprobs[,j] = stats::dnorm(x, mu[j], sigma[j]) }
# return negative for minimization
-LaMa::forward(delta, Gamma, allprobs)
}
theta.star = c(-1,-1,1,4,log(1),log(3))
# initial transformed parameters: not chosen too well
s = Sys.time()
mod = nlm(mllk, theta.star, x = x)
Sys.time()-s
#> Time difference of 0.02000189 secs
We see that implementation of the forward algorithm in C++ leads to really fast estimation speeds.
Again, we use tpm()
and stationary()
to
tranform the unconstraint parameters to working parameters.
# transform parameters to working
Gamma = tpm(mod$estimate[1:2])
delta = stationary(Gamma) # stationary HMM
mu = mod$estimate[3:4]
sigma = exp(mod$estimate[5:6])
hist(x, prob = TRUE, bor = "white", breaks = 40, main = "")
curve(delta[1]*dnorm(x, mu[1], sigma[1]), add = TRUE, lwd = 2, col = "orange", n=500)
curve(delta[2]*dnorm(x, mu[2], sigma[2]), add = TRUE, lwd = 2, col = "deepskyblue", n=500)
curve(delta[1]*dnorm(x, mu[1], sigma[1])+delta[2]*dnorm(x, mu[2], sigma[2]),
add = TRUE, lwd = 2, lty = "dashed", n=500)
legend("topright", col = c(color, "black"), lwd = 2, bty = "n",
lty = c(1,1,2), legend = c("state 1", "state 2", "marginal"))
We can also decode the most probable state sequence with the
viterbi()
function, when first computing the
allprobs
matrix:
allprobs = matrix(1, length(x), 2)
for(j in 1:2){ allprobs[,j] = dnorm(x, mu[j], sigma[j]) }
states = viterbi(delta, Gamma, allprobs)
plot(x, pch = 20, bty = "n", col = color[states])
legend("topright", pch = 20, legend = c("state 1", "state 2"),
col = color, box.lwd = 0)
These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
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