INTRODUCING AN INTERPOLATION METHOD TO EFFICIENTLY IMPLEMENT AN APPROXIMATE MAXIMUM LIKELIHOOD ESTIMATOR FOR THE HURST EXPONENT

The efficiency and accuracy of estimating the Hurst exponent have been two inevitable considerations. Recently, an efficient implementation of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) (simply called the fast MLE) for the Hurst exponent was proposed based on a combination of the Levinson algorithm and Cholesky decomposition, and furthermore the fast MLE has also considered all four possible cases, including known mean, unknown mean, known variance, and unknown variance. In this paper, four cases of an approximate MLE (AMLE) were obtained based on two approximations of the logarithmic determinant and the inverse of a covariance matrix. The computational cost of the AMLE is much lower than that of the MLE, but a little higher than that of the fast MLE. To raise the computational efficiency of the proposed AMLE, a required power spectral density (PSD) was indirectly calculated by interpolating two suitable PSDs chosen from a set of established PSDs. Experimental results show that the AMLE through interpolation (simply called the interpolating AMLE) can speed up computation. The computational speed of the interpolating AMLE is on average over 24 times quicker than that of the fast MLE while remaining the accuracy very close to that of the MLE or the fast MLE.

Efficiently Implementing the Maximum Likelihood Estimator for Hurst Exponent

This paper aims to efficiently implement the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for Hurst exponent, a vital parameter embedded in the process of fractional Brownian motion (FBM) or fractional Gaussian noise (FGN), via a combination of the Levinson algorithm and Cholesky decomposition. Many natural and biomedical signals can often be modeled as one of these two processes. It is necessary for users to estimate the Hurst exponent to differentiate one physical signal from another. Among all estimators for estimating the Hurst exponent, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is optimal, whereas its computational cost is also the highest. Consequently, a faster but slightly less accurate estimator is often adopted. Analysis discovers that the combination of the Levinson algorithm and Cholesky decomposition can avoid storing any matrix and performing any matrix multiplication and thus save a great deal of computer memory and computational time. In addition, the first proposed MLE for the Hurst exponent was based on the assumptions that the mean is known as zero and the variance is unknown. In this paper, all four possible situations are considered: known mean, unknown mean, known variance, and unknown variance. Experimental results show that the MLE through efficiently implementing numerical computation can greatly enhance the computational performance.