Inference and Learning from Data Inference

We continue our discussion of hidden Markov models (HMMs) and consider in this chapter the solution of decoding problems. Specifically, given a sequence of observations {yn,n=1,2,…,N}, we would like to devise mechanisms that allow us to estimate the underlying sequence of state or latent variables {zn,n=1,2,…,N}. That is, we would like to recover the state evolution that “most likely” explains the measurements. We already know how to perform decoding for the case of mixture models with independent observations by using (38.12a)–(38.12b). The solution is more challenging for HMMs because of the dependency among the states.