We prove that under certain mild assumptions, the entropy rate of a hidden Markov chain, observed when passing a finite-state stationary Markov chain through a discrete-time continuous-output channel, is jointly analytic as a function of the input Markov chain parameters and the channel parameters. In particular, as consequences of the main theorems, we obtain analyticity for the entropy rate associated with representative channels: Cauchy and Gaussian.
Entropy rate for hidden Markov chains is notoriously difficult to compute, even in the case where both input and output alphabets are finite and time is discrete. However, recently much progress has been made in this setting; see, for instance @cite_10 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_2 and the references therein.
@cite_1 @cite_10 @cite_3 @cite_2
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We prove that under mild positivity assumptions, the entropy rate of a continuous-state hidden Markov chain, observed when passing a finite-state Markov chain through a discrete-time continuous-output channel, is analytic as a function of the transition probabilities of the underlying Markov chain. We further prove that the entropy rate of a continuous-state hidden Markov chain, observed when passing a mixing finite-type constrained Markov chain through a discrete-time Gaussian channel, is smooth as a function of the transition probabilities of the underlying Markov chain. We study the entropy rate of a hidden Markov process (HMP) defined by observing the output of a binary symmetric channel whose input is a first-order binary Markov process. Despite the simplicity of the models involved, the characterization of this entropy is a long standing open problem. By presenting the probability of a sequence under the model as a product of random matrices, one can see that the entropy rate sought is equal to a top Lyapunov exponent of the product. This offers an explanation for the elusiveness of explicit expressions for the HMP entropy rate, as Lyapunov exponents are notoriously difficult to compute. Consequently, we focus on asymptotic estimates, and apply the same product of random matrices to derive an explicit expression for a Taylor approximation of the entropy rate with respect to the parameter of the binary symmetric channel. The accuracy of the approximation is validated against empirical simulation results. We also extend our results to higher-order Markov processes and to Renyi entropies of any order. A recent result presented the expansion for the entropy rate of a hidden Markov process (HMP) as a power series in the noise variable epsi. The coefficients of the expansion around the noiseless (epsi=0) limit were calculated up to 11th order, using a conjecture that relates the entropy rate of an HMP to the entropy of a process of finite length (which is calculated analytically). In this letter, we generalize and prove the conjecture and discuss its theoretical and practical consequences We consider a discrete time hidden Markov model where the signal is a stationary Markov chain. When conditioned on the observations, the signal is a Markov chain in a random environment under the conditional measure. It is shown that this conditional signal is weakly ergodic when the signal is ergodic and the observations are nondegenerate. This permits a delicate exchange of the intersection and supremum of σ-fields, which is key for the stability of the nonlinear filter and partially resolves a long-standing gap in the proof of a result of Kunita [J. Multivariate Anal. 1 (1971) 365―393]. A similar result is obtained also in the continuous time setting. The proofs are based on an ergodic theorem for Markov chains in random environments in a general state space.