Title
On the Consistency of Maximum Likelihood Estimators for Causal Network Identification
Abstract
We consider the problem of identifying parameters of a particular class of Markov chains, called Bernoulli Autoregressive (BAR) processes. The structure of any BAR model is encoded by a directed graph. Incoming edges to a node in the graph indicate that the state of the node at a particular time instant is influenced by the states of the corresponding parental nodes in the previous time instant. The associated edge weights determine the corresponding level of influence from each parental node. In the simplest setup, the Bernoulli parameter of a particular node's state variable is a convex combination of the parental node states in the previous time instant and an additional Bernoulli noise random variable. This paper focuses on the problem of edge weight identification using Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation and proves that the ML estimator is strongly consistent for two variants of the BAR model. We additionally derive closed-form estimators for the aforementioned two variants and prove their strong consistency.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/CDC42340.2020.9304475
CDC
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Xiaotian Xie100.34
Dimitrios Katselis211212.34
Carolyn L. Beck340160.19
Srikant, R.46868544.90