Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are probabilistic functions of finite Markov
chains, or, put in other words, state space models with finite state space. In
this paper, we examine subspace estimation methods for HMMs whose output lies a
finite set as well. In particular, we study the geometric structure arising
from the nonminimality of the linear state space representation of HMMs, and
consistency of a subspace algorithm arising from a certain factorization of the
singular value decomposition of the estimated linear prediction matrix. For
this algorithm, we show that the estimates of the transition and emission
probability matrices are consistent up to a similarity transformation, and that
the m-step linear predictor computed from the estimated system matrices is
consistent, i.e., converges to the true optimal linear m-step predictor.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOS711 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org