On the Consistency of Maximum Likelihood Estimators for Causal Network Identification

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Abstract

We consider the problem of identifying parameters of a particular class of Markov chains, called Bernoulli Autoregressive (BAR) processes. The structure of any BAR model is encoded by a directed graph. Incoming edges to a node in the graph indicate that the state of the node at a particular time instant is influenced by the states of the corresponding parental nodes in the previous time instant. The associated edge weights determine the corresponding level of influence from each parental node. In the simplest setup, the Bernoulli parameter of a particular node's state variable is a convex combination of the parental node states in the previous time instant and an additional Bernoulli noise random variable. This letter focuses on the problem of edge weight identification using Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation and proves that the ML estimator is strongly consistent for two variants of the BAR model. We additionally derive closed-form estimators for the aforementioned two variants and prove their strong consistency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number9333685
Pages (from-to)175-180
Number of pages6
JournalIEEE Control Systems Letters
Volume6
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022

Keywords

  • Identification
  • Markov chains

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Control and Optimization

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