Multilevel Particle Filters: Normalizing Constant Estimation

, Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117546, Singapore

, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan

Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117546, Singapore

Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117546, Singapore

ABSTRACT

In this article we introduce two new estimates of the normalizing constant (or marginal likelihood) for partially observed diffusion (POD) processes, with discrete observations. One estimate is biased but non-negative and the other is unbiased but not almost surely non-negative. Our method uses the multilevel particle filter of [11]. We show that, under assumptions, for Euler discretized PODs and a given ε > 0 in order to obtain a mean square error (MSE) of O(ε2) one requires a work of O(ε−2.5) for our new estimates versus a standard particle filter that requires a work of O(ε−3). Our theoretical results are supported by numerical simulations.