We develop an approach to spectral estimation that has been advocated by
Ferrante, Masiero and Pavon and, in the context of the scalar-valued covariance
extension problem, by Enqvist and Karlsson. The aim is to determine the power
spectrum that is consistent with given moments and minimizes the relative
entropy between the probability law of the underlying Gaussian stochastic
process to that of a prior. The approach is analogous to the framework of
earlier work by Byrnes, Georgiou and Lindquist and can also be viewed as a
generalization of the classical work by Burg and Jaynes on the maximum entropy
method. In the present paper we present a new fast algorithm in the general
case (i.e., for general Gaussian priors) and show that for priors with a
specific structure the solution can be given in closed form.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
