Package demo: Hidden Markov Model

In ino: Initialization of Numerical Optimization

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse  = TRUE,
  comment   = "#>",
  fig.align = "center",
  fig.path  = "figures/hmm-",
  fig.dim   = c(8, 6), 
  out.width = "75%",
  # all optimizations are pre-computed to save building time of the vignette
  eval      = FALSE,
  message   = FALSE,
  warning   = FALSE
)
library("ino")
data("Nop_hmm")
set.seed(1)

HMMs are statistical models used to explain systems that can only be observed indirectly through a sequence of outputs, and have unobservable hidden states. They consist of two processes,

1. a Markov process that describes the hidden states, and

2. an observable process that describes the outputs produced by the system, where the probability of observing an output at a given time depends only on the current state.

State-switching models like HMMs are commonly used in speech recognition, animal movement modeling, and finance. For more technical details about HMMs and their scope of application, see @Zucchini:2016.

Numerical likelihood optimization is a prominent method for fitting HMMs to empirical data. In this vignette we describe the workflow of using the {ino} package for analyzing the initialization effect in this optimization task.

Application to financial data

The example data set considered throughout this vignette covers a time series of log returns from the German stock index DAX over 30 years. The DAX closing prices are freely accessible via Yahoo Finance and can be downloaded via the download_data() function from the {fHMM} package [@Oelschlaeger:2024]. We transform them to log-returns using the {dplyr} package [@Wickham:2023]:

library("fHMM")
library("dplyr")
dax <- download_data(symbol = "^GDAXI", from = "1990-01-01", to = "2020-01-01") %>%
  as_tibble() %>%
  reframe(
    date = as.Date(Date, format = "%Y-%m-%d"),
    logreturn = c(NA, diff(log(Close), lag = 1))
  ) %>%
  filter(!is.na(logreturn)) %>%
  print()

The time series looks as follows:

library("ggplot2")
ggplot(dax, aes(x = date, y = logreturn)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_line() +
  scale_x_date() +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::label_percent())

As the log-returns are continuous and can take both negative and positive values, we consider an HMM with Gaussian state-dependent distributions --- note that some applications instead use t-distributions to also model the kurtosis [@Oelschlaeger:2021].

Likelihood optimization

We consider a 2-state (states = 2) Gaussian-HMM (sdds = "normal") here to model bearish and bullish market periods. This results in six parameters (npar = 6) to be estimated (to be optimized, respectively):

• two identified parameters for the transition probability matrix,
• two for the means of the state-dependent distributions,
• two for the standard deviations of the state-dependent distributions.

The likelihood function ll_hmm() is provided by the {fHMM} package. The argument negative = TRUE indicates that we minimize the negative log-likelihood.

Nop_hmm <- Nop$new(
  f = fHMM::ll_hmm, 
  npar = 6, 
  observations = dax$logreturn,
  sdds = "normal",
  states = 2, 
  negative = TRUE
)

In this example, we optimize using the optimizer stats::nlm() (see the introductory vignette for more details on how to specify optimizers):

Nop_hmm$set_optimizer(optimizeR::Optimizer$new("stats::nlm"))

Parallel optimization and progress updates

For convenience, The {ino} package supports parallel computation of optimization runs based on the {future} package [@Bengtsson:2021] and printing progress messages based on the {progressr} package [@Bengtsson:2024].

For example, calling

future::plan(future::multisession, workers = 10)

uses parallel computation in 10 parallel R sessions, and calling

progressr::handlers(global = TRUE)

prints a progress bar.

Random initialization

Choosing random starting values is a first naive initialization approach, which can be tested as follows:

Nop_hmm$
  initialize_random(runs = 100)$
  optimize(optimization_label = "random_naive")

The method $initialize_random() selects runs = 100 random initial values, which are drawn from a standard normal distribution by default. Next, the $optimize() method initiates optimization of the likelihood function starting from these values. The results are labeled as "random_naive" to facilitate comparison later.

Instead of drawing initial values from a standard normal distribution, users can define a custom sampler function, for example:

sampler <- function() {
  c(stats::runif(2, -2, -1), stats::rnorm(2), log(stats::runif(2, 0.5, 2)))
}

This sampler is based on the following ideas:

• As the first two starting values belong to the off-diagonal of the transition probability matrix, we draw starting values from a $\mathcal{U}(-2,-1)$ distribution --- the likelihood function uses the multinomial logit link to ensure that the probabilities are between $0$ and $1$, a value of $-1.5$ correspond to probabilities of staying in state 1 or 2 of about $80\%$.
• For the two means, we draw two random numbers from the standard normal distribution, as the time series above indicates that the log-returns vary around zero.
• The starting values for the standard deviations are drawn from a $\mathcal{U}(0.5,2)$ distribution (note that the likelihood function exponentiates the standard deviations as they are constrained to be positive, and hence we log-transform the starting values).

The optimize() method then performs runs = 100 optimizations with starting values drawn from the specified distributions:

Nop_hmm$
  initialize_random(sampler = sampler, runs = 100)$
  optimize(optimization_label = "random")

Grid initialization with educated guesses

Another initialization strategy that closely relates to specifying a custom sampler for the initial values is to make "educated guesses" and to consider a grid of these values as initialization. This can be implemented via the $initialize_grid() method, where and lower and upper limits and breaks can be specified. Here, we consider a grid of 64 starting values that fall in the ranges considered above:

Nop_hmm$
  initialize_grid(
    lower = c(-2, -2, -0.1, -0.1, log(0.1), log(0.1)),
    upper = c(-1, -1, 0.1, 0.1, log(1), log(1)),
    breaks = 2
  )$
  optimize(optimization_label = "educated_guess")

Subset initialization

Since the data set is large, containing a total of r nrow(dax) log-return observations, it might be beneficial to obtain initial values by first fitting the model to a data subset. If the data subset is chosen small enough, estimation with the subset will be much faster. On the other hand, if the data subset is chosen large enough to still contain enough information, the estimates on the subset will already lie close to the estimates for the full model and provide good initial values for the full optimization.

To illustrate the subset initialization strategy, we consider the first quarter of observations, which can be extracted using the $reduce_argument() method with arguments how = "first" and proportion = 0.25. The starting values for the optimizations on this subset are drawn from the sampler() function defined above. We again use $optimize() to fit the HMM, but now to the data subset. With $initialize_continue(), we then use the estimates obtained from the optimization on the subset as initial values to fit the model to the entire data set.

Finally, the entire data set is recovered via $fixed_argument("reset", argument_name = "observations"). If we were to skip this step, all future optimization runs would be made on the subset.

Nop_hmm$
  reduce_argument("observations", how = "first", proportion = 0.25)$
  initialize_random(sampler = sampler, runs = 100)$
  optimize(optimization_label = "reduced")$
  fixed_argument("reset", argument_name = "observations")$
  initialize_continue("reduced")$
  optimize(optimization_label = "initialized_reduced")

Standardize initialization

The considered log-returns range r paste(c("from", "to"), round(range(dax$logreturn), 1), collapse = " "). Optimization might be facilitated by standardizing the data first. This idea can be tested via the $standardize_argument() method:

Nop_hmm$standardize_argument("observations")

The values used for the standardization can be extracted as follows:

observations <- Nop_hmm$fixed_argument("get", argument_name = "observations")
(center <- attr(observations, "center"))
(scale <- attr(observations, "scale"))

Optimization proceeds as usual:

Nop_hmm$
  initialize_random(sampler = sampler, runs = 100)$
  optimize(optimization_label = "standardized")$
  fixed_argument(action = "reset", argument_name = "observations")

Note that the results obtained on the standardized optimization problem could be back-transformed via:

transform <- function(x) {
  c(x[1:2], x[3:4] * scale + center, log(exp(x[3:4]) * scale + center))
}

Evaluating the optimization runs

Global versus local optima

Selecting the starting values for the HMM likelihood optimization is a well-known issue, as poor starting values may likely result in local optima. We thus first evaluate the optimizations by comparing the likelihood values at convergence, which can be displayed using the $optima() method. Here,

• sort_by = "value" sorts the table by function value,
• digitis = 0 ignores any decimal places.

Nop_hmm$optima(sort_by_value = TRUE, digits = 0)

optima <- Nop_hmm$optima(sort_by_value = TRUE, digits = 0)
global <- optima |> arrange(value) |> slice(1) |> pull(n)
total <- sum(optima$n)
local <- total - global

The frequency table indicates that r global out of r total runs converged to the smallest (negative) log-likelihood value, which appears to be the global optimum (note that these are the negative log-likelihood values). However, in r local runs we apparently got stuck in local optima.

Using $results, we now can investigate the optimum values ("value"), the corresponding parameter vectors ("parameter"), and the optimization times ("seconds") of all runs (here, only the first are shown):

Nop_hmm$results |> select(value, parameter, seconds)

The final parameter estimates can be accessed:

Nop_hmm$minimum

Next, we can compute the proportion of runs that lead to the apparent global optimum as follows (note that the standardized initialization approach cannot be compared to the other approaches here and is filtered via the .original identifier):

Nop_hmm$results |> 
  filter(.original) |>
  mutate(global_optimum = value < -22445) |>
  group_by(.optimization_label) |>
  summarise(proportion = mean(global_optimum, na.rm = TRUE))

Optimization time

The autoplot() method can be used to investigate the optimization times across initialization strategies by setting group_by = "optimization":

Nop_hmm$results |> autoplot(group_by = "optimization")

We can also compute summary statistics of interest, like the median computation time or standard deviation per strategy:

Nop_hmm$results |>
  group_by(.optimization_label) %>%
  summarise(
    median_seconds = median(seconds, na.rm = TRUE),
    sd_seconds = sd(seconds, na.rm = TRUE)
  ) %>%
  arrange(median_seconds)

The subset and the standardize approach can improve the median optimization time by a factor of about 2 in this example compared to the random initialization approach. Standardization also reduces standard deviation in computation time, indicating more stable optimization.

References

ino documentation built on Aug. 8, 2025, 7:17 p.m.