higherOrderLogLik: Log-likelihood, deviance and information criteria of a higher...

In markovchain: Easy Handling Discrete Time Markov Chains

Log-likelihood, deviance and information criteria of a higher order Markov chain

Description

Evaluates the log-likelihood of an empirical sequence under the higher order Markov chain returned by fitHigherOrder, and derives the deviance, AIC and BIC, so that models of different orders can be compared.

Usage

higherOrderLogLik(sequence, fit = NULL, order = 2, start = NULL)

Arguments

sequence	The empirical sequence of states, a character vector or a vector coercible to character (numbers and factors are matched to the states of the fit as character strings).
fit	The list returned by fitHigherOrder (or by fitMTD) for sequence. If NULL, fitHigherOrder(sequence, order) is computed.
order	Order of the model to fit when fit is NULL (ignored otherwise; the order is then length(fit$lambda)).
start	Index of the first observation included in the likelihood. Defaults to order + 1, the earliest observation a model of that order can predict.

Details

The fitted model is the mixture-transition-distribution model of Raftery (1985) in the form used by Ching et al.: the probability of moving to state x_t given the past is

P(x_t \mid x_{t-1}, \dots, x_{t-k}) = \sum_{i=1}^{k} \lambda_i\, Q_i[x_t, x_{t-i}],

where Q_i is the lag-i transition matrix (see seq2matHigh) and k is the order. The log-likelihood is the sum of the logarithms of these probabilities over the observations t = start, \dots, T, and the deviance is -2 times the log-likelihood.

Two points matter when interpreting the output. First, fitHigherOrder chooses \lambda by default (method = "lsq") by least squares on the stationary distribution, not by maximum likelihood, so the value returned is the log-likelihood of the fitted model, not the maximum attainable one; with method = "mle" the weights maximize this log-likelihood for the observations a model of that order can predict. Second, a model of order k can only be evaluated from observation k + 1 onwards; to compare orders on exactly the same data set start to 1 + the largest order compared, otherwise the models are evaluated on different numbers of observations and neither the log-likelihood nor the information criteria are comparable.

The number of parameters used for AIC and BIC is the dimension of the set of transition laws the model can represent, (r - 1)(1 + k (r - 1)), with r the number of states: each of the k lag matrices has r (r - 1) free probabilities and there are k - 1 free weights, but the weights of a mixture of lag matrices are not identifiable (a distribution common to all departure states can be moved from \lambda_j Q_j to \lambda_i Q_i without changing any transition probability), which removes r (k - 1) parameters from the naive count k\, r (r - 1) + (k - 1): for each next state the transition probability is a sum of one term for each lag, a main-effects function of the k past states, with 1 + k (r - 1) free coefficients. For k = 1 both counts are r (r - 1). For a fit returned by fitMTD, whose lags share a single matrix, it is r (r - 1) + (k - 1).

Value

A list with components logLik, deviance, AIC, BIC, nobs (number of observations entering the likelihood), npar, order and start. The log-likelihood is -Inf if an observed transition has probability zero under the model (possible only for a sequence other than the one the model was fitted on).

References

Raftery, A. E. (1985). A model for high-order Markov chains. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 47(3), 528-539.

Ching, W. K., Huang, X., Ng, M. K., & Siu, T. K. (2013). Higher-order markov chains. In Markov Chains (pp. 141-176). Springer US.

See Also

fitHigherOrder, fitMTD, higherOrderPredict

Examples

sequence <- c("a", "a", "b", "b", "a", "c", "b", "a", "b", "c", "a", "b",
              "c", "a", "b", "c", "a", "b", "a", "b")
# compare orders 1 and 2 on the same observations (start = 3)
if (requireNamespace("Rsolnp", quietly = TRUE)) {
  fit1 <- fitHigherOrder(sequence, order = 1)
  fit2 <- fitHigherOrder(sequence, order = 2)
  sapply(list(order1 = fit1, order2 = fit2), function(f)
    unlist(higherOrderLogLik(sequence, f, start = 3)[c("logLik", "deviance", "AIC", "BIC")]))
}

markovchain documentation built on Oct. 10, 2026, 9:07 a.m.