Apply EM for a missing observation in a Gaussian AR1 process, starting from in the stationary parameter space. The Gaussian AR1 bridge gives the E-step quantities
Thus , , and , .
Let and otherwise. Keeping fixed throughout the M-step, define
The last term comes from the missing observation's conditional variance in the two adjacent innovation squares. The expected complete-data log-likelihood is
For fixed , differentiating the quadratic in gives
Also the maximizing variance is . The M-step is therefore a one-dimensional profile likelihood maximization:
Repeat the E- and M-steps until the observed-data likelihood and parameters stabilize. Exact M-steps make that likelihood nondecreasing; different initializations help detect different local optima, and convergence alone is not a guarantee of a global maximum. At an interior local maximum, impute the missing temperature by its conditional mean evaluated at the fitted parameters, retaining as its conditional uncertainty. Replacing by and discarding would not implement the expectation-maximization algorithm.