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.
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.