Use the chain rule for conditional densities. With , the likelihood function of the nondegenerate observations is
The first residual is and carries no parameter information. There is no ordinary joint Lebesgue density for because deterministically; this expression is the conditional likelihood function given the fixed initial values, or the likelihood function on . The initial point mass is parameter independent and has no effect on inference. This is the conditional likelihood of an initialized Gaussian AR(2) process.