Applications of Hidden Markov Chains

Hidden Markov models were described in a series of statistical papers by Leonard E. Baum and other authors in the second half of the 1960s. One of the first applications of HMMs was speech recognition, starting in the mid-1970s.

In the second half of the 1980s, HMMs began to be applied to the analysis of biological sequences, in particular DNA. Since then, they have become ubiquitous in the field of bioinformatics.

Extensions

In the hidden Markov models considered above, the state space of the hidden variables is discrete, while the observations themselves can either be discrete (typically generated from a categorical distribution) or continuous (typically from a Gaussian distribution). Hidden Markov models can also be generalized to allow continuous state spaces. Examples of such models are those where the Markov process over hidden variables is a linear dynamical system, with a linear relationship among related variables and where all hidden and observed variables follow a Gaussian distribution. In simple cases, such as the linear dynamical system just mentioned, exact inference is tractable (in this case, using the Kalman filter); however, in general, exact inference in HMMs with continuous latent variables is infeasible, and approximate methods must be used, such as the extended Kalman filter or the particle filter.

Hidden Markov models are generative models, in which the joint distribution of observations and hidden states, or equivalently both the prior distribution of hidden states (the transition probabilities) and conditional distribution of observations given states (the emission probabilities), is modeled. The above algorithms implicitly assume a uniform prior distribution over the transition probabilities. However, it is also possible to create hidden Markov models with other types of prior distributions. An obvious candidate, given the categorical distribution of the transition probabilities, is the Dirichlet distribution, which is the conjugate prior distribution of the categorical distribution. Typically, a symmetric Dirichlet distribution is chosen, reflecting ignorance about which states are inherently more likely than others. The single parameter of this distribution (termed the concentration parameter) controls the relative density or sparseness of the resulting transition matrix. A choice of 1 yields a uniform distribution. Values greater than 1 produce a dense matrix, in which the transition probabilities between pairs of states are likely to be nearly equal. Values less than 1 result in a sparse matrix in which, for each given source state, only a small number of destination states have non-negligible transition probabilities. It is also possible to use a two-level prior Dirichlet distribution, in which one Dirichlet distribution (the upper distribution) governs the parameters of another Dirichlet distribution (the lower distribution), which in turn governs the transition probabilities. The upper distribution governs the overall distribution of states, determining how likely each state is to occur; its concentration parameter determines the density or sparseness of states. Such a two-level prior distribution, where both concentration parameters are set to produce sparse distributions, might be useful for example in unsupervised part-of-speech tagging, where some parts of speech occur much more commonly than others; learning algorithms that assume a uniform prior distribution generally perform poorly on this task. The parameters of models of this sort, with non-uniform prior distributions, can be learned using Gibbs sampling or extended versions of the expectation-maximization algorithm.

An extension of the previously described hidden Markov models with Dirichlet priors uses a Dirichlet process in place of a Dirichlet distribution. This type of model allows for an unknown and potentially infinite number of states. It is common to use a two-level Dirichlet process, similar to the previously described model with two levels of Dirichlet distributions. Such a model is called a hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden Markov model, or HDP-HMM for short. It was originally described under the name "Infinite Hidden Markov Model" and was further formalized in "Hierarchical Dirichlet Processes".

A different type of extension uses a discriminative model in place of the generative model of standard HMMs. This type of model directly models the conditional distribution of the hidden states given the observations, rather than modeling the joint distribution. An example of this model is the so-called maximum entropy Markov model (MEMM), which models the conditional distribution of the states using logistic regression (also known as a "maximum entropy model"). The advantage of this type of model is that arbitrary features (i.e. functions) of the observations can be modeled, allowing domain-specific knowledge of the problem at hand to be injected into the model. Models of this sort are not limited to modeling direct dependencies between a hidden state and its associated observation; rather, features of nearby observations, of combinations of the associated observation and nearby observations, or in fact of arbitrary observations at any distance from a given hidden state can be included in the process used to determine the value of a hidden state. Furthermore, there is no need for these features to be statistically independent of each other, as would be the case if such features were used in a generative model. Finally, arbitrary features over pairs of adjacent hidden states can be used rather than simple transition probabilities. The disadvantages of such models are: (1) The types of prior distributions that can be placed on hidden states are severely limited; (2) It is not possible to predict the probability of seeing an arbitrary observation. This second limitation is often not an issue in practice, since many common usages of HMM's do not require such predictive probabilities.

A variant of the previously described discriminative model is the linear-chain conditional random field. This uses an undirected graphical model (aka Markov random field) rather than the directed graphical models of MEMM's and similar models. The advantage of this type of model is that it does not suffer from the so-called label bias problem of MEMM's, and thus may make more accurate predictions. The disadvantage is that training can be slower than for MEMM's.

Yet another variant is the factorial hidden Markov model, which allows for a single observation to be conditioned on the corresponding hidden variables of a set of $K$ independent Markov chains, rather than a single Markov chain. It is equivalent to a single HMM, with $N^{K}$ states (assuming there are $N$ states for each chain), and therefore, learning in such a model is difficult: for a sequence of length $T$, a straightforward Viterbi algorithm has complexity $O(N^{2K}\,T)$. To find an exact solution, a junction tree algorithm could be used, but it results in an $O(N^{K+1}\,K\,T)$complexity. In practice, approximate techniques, such as variational approaches, could be used.

All of the above models can be extended to allow for more distant dependencies among hidden states, e.g. allowing for a given state to be dependent on the previous two or three states rather than a single previous state; i.e. the transition probabilities are extended to encompass sets of three or four adjacent states (or in general $K$ adjacent states). The disadvantage of such models is that dynamic-programming algorithms for training them have an $O(N^{K}\,T)$ running time, for $K$ adjacent states and $T$ total observations (i.e. a length- $T$ Markov chain).

Another recent extension is the triplet Markov model, in which an auxiliary underlying process is added to model some data specificities. Many variants of this model have been proposed. One should also mention the interesting link that has been established between the theory of evidence and the triplet Markov models and which allows to fuse data in Markovian context and to model nonstationary data. Note that alternative multi-stream data fusion strategies have also been proposed in the recent literature, e.g.

Finally, a different rationale towards addressing the problem of modeling nonstationary data by means of hidden Markov models was suggested in 2012. It consists in employing a small recurrent neural network (RNN), specifically a reservoir network, to capture the evolution of the temporal dynamics in the observed data. This information, encoded in the form of a high-dimensional vector, is used as a conditioning variable of the HMM state transition probabilities. Under such a setup, we eventually obtain a nonstationary HMM the transition probabilities of which evolve over time in a manner that is inferred from the data itself, as opposed to some unrealistic ad-hoc model of temporal evolution.

In 2023, two innovative algorithms were introduced for the Hidden Markov Model. These algorithms enable the computation of the posterior distribution of the HMM without the necessity of explicitly modeling the joint distribution, utilizing only the conditional distributions. Unlike traditional methods such as the Forward-Backward and Viterbi algorithms, which require knowledge of the joint law of the HMM and can be computationally intensive to learn, the Discriminative Forward-Backward and Discriminative Viterbi algorithms circumvent the need for the observation's law. This breakthrough allows the HMM to be applied as a discriminative model, offering a more efficient and versatile approach to leveraging Hidden Markov Models in various applications.

The model suitable in the context of longitudinal data is named latent Markov model. The basic version of this model has been extended to include individual covariates, random effects and to model more complex data structures such as multilevel data. A complete overview of the latent Markov models, with special attention to the model assumptions and to their practical use is provided in