This thesis extends and improves methods for estimating key quantities of hidden Markov models through spectral method-of-moments estimation. Unlike traditional estimation methods like EM and Gibbs sampling, the set of estimation methods, which we call spectral HMMs (sHMMs), are incredibly fast, do not require multiple restarts, and come with provable guarantees. Our first result improves upon ...

Many complex systems can be modeled via Markov jump processes. Applications include chemical reactions, population dynamics, and telecommunication networks. Rare-event estimation for such models can be difficult and is often computationally expensive, because typically many (or very long) paths of the Markov jump process need to be simulated in order to observe the rare event. We present a stat...

Among various HLM techniques, the Multivariate Hierarchical Linear Model (MHLM) is desirable to use, particularly when multivariate criterion variables are collected and the covariance structure has information valuable for data analysis. In order to reflect prior information or to obtain stable results when the sample size and the number of groups are not sufficiently large, the Bayes method h...

We consider problems of sequence processing and propose a solution based on a discrete-state model in order to represent past context. We introduce a recurrent connectionist architecture having a modular structure that associates a subnetwork to each state. The model has a statistical interpretation we call input-output hidden Markov model (IOHMM). It can be trained by the estimation-maximizati...

The hidden Markov models have been widely applied to systems with sequential data. However, the conditional independence of the state outputs will limit the output of a hidden Markov model to be a piecewise constant random sequence, which is not a good approximation for many real processes. In this paper, a high-order hidden Markov model for piecewise linear processes is proposed to better appr...