Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 218 5 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
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 quantitiesThus , , and , .
Let and otherwise. Keeping fixed throughout the M-step, defineThe last term comes from the missing observation's conditional variance in the two adjacent innovation squares. The expected complete-data log-likelihood isFor fixed , differentiating the quadratic in givesAlso 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.