Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Feng, Kwan, Jeffrey, Stindl, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11075
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910304277889024
author Chen, Feng
Kwan, Jeffrey
Stindl, Tom
author_facet Chen, Feng
Kwan, Jeffrey
Stindl, Tom
contents The Hawkes process is a widely used model in many areas, such as finance, seismology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and social sciences. Estimation of the Hawkes process from continuous observations of a sample path is relatively straightforward using either the maximum likelihood or other methods. However, estimating the parameters of a Hawkes process from observations of a sample path at discrete time points only is challenging due to the intractability of the likelihood with such data. In this work, we introduce a method to estimate the Hawkes process from a discretely observed sample path. The method takes advantage of a state-space representation of the incomplete data problem and use the sequential Monte Carlo (aka particle filtering) to approximate the likelihood function. As an estimator of the likelihood function the SMC approximation is unbiased, and therefore it can be used together with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to construct Markov Chains to approximate the likelihood distribution, or more generally, the posterior distribution of model parameters. The performance of the methodology is assessed using simulation experiments and compared with other recently published methods. The proposed estimator is found to have a smaller mean square error than the two benchmark estimators. The proposed method has the additional advantage that confidence intervals for the parameters are easily available. We apply the proposed estimator to the analysis of weekly count data on measles cases in Tokyo Japan and compare the results to those by one of the benchmark methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_11075
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating the Hawkes process from a discretely observed sample path
Chen, Feng
Kwan, Jeffrey
Stindl, Tom
Methodology
Computation
The Hawkes process is a widely used model in many areas, such as finance, seismology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and social sciences. Estimation of the Hawkes process from continuous observations of a sample path is relatively straightforward using either the maximum likelihood or other methods. However, estimating the parameters of a Hawkes process from observations of a sample path at discrete time points only is challenging due to the intractability of the likelihood with such data. In this work, we introduce a method to estimate the Hawkes process from a discretely observed sample path. The method takes advantage of a state-space representation of the incomplete data problem and use the sequential Monte Carlo (aka particle filtering) to approximate the likelihood function. As an estimator of the likelihood function the SMC approximation is unbiased, and therefore it can be used together with the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to construct Markov Chains to approximate the likelihood distribution, or more generally, the posterior distribution of model parameters. The performance of the methodology is assessed using simulation experiments and compared with other recently published methods. The proposed estimator is found to have a smaller mean square error than the two benchmark estimators. The proposed method has the additional advantage that confidence intervals for the parameters are easily available. We apply the proposed estimator to the analysis of weekly count data on measles cases in Tokyo Japan and compare the results to those by one of the benchmark methods.
title Estimating the Hawkes process from a discretely observed sample path
topic Methodology
Computation
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11075