No Arabic abstract
Parameter estimation in multidimensional diffusion models with only one coordinate observed is highly relevant in many biological applications, but a statistically difficult problem. In neuroscience, the membrane potential evolution in single neurons can be measured at high frequency, but biophysical realistic models have to include the unobserved dynamics of ion channels. One such model is the stochastic Morris-Lecar model, defined by a nonlinear two-dimensional stochastic differential equation. The coordinates are coupled, that is, the unobserved coordinate is nonautonomous, the model exhibits oscillations to mimic the spiking behavior, which means it is not of gradient-type, and the measurement noise from intracellular recordings is typically negligible. Therefore, the hidden Markov model framework is degenerate, and available methods break down. The main contributions of this paper are an approach to estimate in this ill-posed situation and nonasymptotic convergence results for the method. Specifically, we propose a sequential Monte Carlo particle filter algorithm to impute the unobserved coordinate, and then estimate parameters maximizing a pseudo-likelihood through a stochastic version of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm. It turns out that even the rate scaling parameter governing the opening and closing of ion channels of the unobserved coordinate can be reasonably estimated. An experimental data set of intracellular recordings of the membrane potential of a spinal motoneuron of a red-eared turtle is analyzed, and the performance is further evaluated in a simulation study.
A new robust stochastic volatility (SV) model having Student-t marginals is proposed. Our process is defined through a linear normal regression model driven by a latent gamma process that controls temporal dependence. This gamma process is strategically chosen to enable us to find an explicit expression for the pairwise joint density function of the Student-t response process. With this at hand, we propose a composite likelihood (CL) based inference for our model, which can be straightforwardly implemented with a low computational cost. This is a remarkable feature of our Student-t SV process over existing SV models in the literature that involve computationally heavy algorithms for estimating parameters. Aiming at a precise estimation of the parameters related to the latent process, we propose a CL Expectation-Maximization algorithm and discuss a bootstrap approach to obtain standard errors. The finite-sample performance of our composite likelihood methods is assessed through Monte Carlo simulations. The methodology is motivated by an empirical application in the financial market. We analyze the relationship, across multiple time periods, between various US sector Exchange-Traded Funds returns and individual companies stock price returns based on our novel Student-t model. This relationship is further utilized in selecting optimal financial portfolios.
We show that the stochastic Morris-Lecar neuron, in a neighborhood of its stable point, can be approximated by a two-dimensional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) modulation of a constant circular motion. The associated radial OU process is an example of a leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) model prior to firing. A new model constructed from a radial OU process together with a simple firing mechanism based on detailed Morris-Lecar firing statistics reproduces the Morris-Lecar Interspike Interval (ISI) distribution, and has the computational advantages of a LIF. The result justifies the large amount of attention paid to the LIF models.
We consider the problem of estimating parameters of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with discrete-time observations that are either completely or partially observed. The transition density between two observations is generally unknown. We propose an importance sampling approach with an auxiliary parameter when the transition density is unknown. We embed the auxiliary importance sampler in a penalized maximum likelihood framework which produces more accurate and computationally efficient parameter estimates. Simulation studies in three different models illustrate promising improvements of the new penalized simulated maximum likelihood method. The new procedure is designed for the challenging case when some state variables are unobserved and moreover, observed states are sparse over time, which commonly arises in ecological studies. We apply this new approach to two epidemics of chronic wasting disease in mule deer.
The ability to generate samples of the random effects from their conditional distributions is fundamental for inference in mixed effects models. Random walk Metropolis is widely used to perform such sampling, but this method is known to converge slowly for medium dimensional problems, or when the joint structure of the distributions to sample is spatially heterogeneous. The main contribution consists of an independent Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm based on a multidimensional Gaussian proposal that takes into account the joint conditional distribution of the random effects and does not require any tuning. Indeed, this distribution is automatically obtained thanks to a Laplace approximation of the incomplete data model. Such approximation is shown to be equivalent to linearizing the structural model in the case of continuous data. Numerical experiments based on simulated and real data illustrate the performance of the proposed methods. For fitting nonlinear mixed effects models, the suggested MH algorithm is efficiently combined with a stochastic approximation version of the EM algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of the global parameters.
We deal with the problem of parameter estimation in stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in a partially observed framework. We aim to design a method working for both elliptic and hypoelliptic SDEs, the latters being characterized by degenerate diffusion coefficients. This feature often causes the failure of contrast estimators based on Euler Maruyama discretization scheme and dramatically impairs classic stochastic filtering methods used to reconstruct the unobserved states. All of theses issues make the estimation problem in hypoelliptic SDEs difficult to solve. To overcome this, we construct a well-defined cost function no matter the elliptic nature of the SDEs. We also bypass the filtering step by considering a control theory perspective. The unobserved states are estimated by solving deterministic optimal control problems using numerical methods which do not need strong assumptions on the diffusion coefficient conditioning. Numerical simulations made on different partially observed hypoelliptic SDEs reveal our method produces accurate estimate while dramatically reducing the computational price comparing to other methods.