Book Image

Hands-On Markov Models with Python

By : Ankur Ankan, Abinash Panda
Book Image

Hands-On Markov Models with Python

By: Ankur Ankan, Abinash Panda

Overview of this book

Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a statistical model based on the Markov chain concept. Hands-On Markov Models with Python helps you get to grips with HMMs and different inference algorithms by working on real-world problems. The hands-on examples explored in the book help you simplify the process flow in machine learning by using Markov model concepts, thereby making it accessible to everyone. Once you’ve covered the basic concepts of Markov chains, you’ll get insights into Markov processes, models, and types with the help of practical examples. After grasping these fundamentals, you’ll move on to learning about the different algorithms used in inferences and applying them in state and parameter inference. In addition to this, you’ll explore the Bayesian approach of inference and learn how to apply it in HMMs. In further chapters, you’ll discover how to use HMMs in time series analysis and natural language processing (NLP) using Python. You’ll also learn to apply HMM to image processing using 2D-HMM to segment images. Finally, you’ll understand how to apply HMM for reinforcement learning (RL) with the help of Q-Learning, and use this technique for single-stock and multi-stock algorithmic trading. By the end of this book, you will have grasped how to build your own Markov and hidden Markov models on complex datasets in order to apply them to projects.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Evaluation of an HMM

In the previous section, we discussed generating an observation sequence of a given HMM. But, in reality, most of the time we are not interested in generating the observation sequence, mostly because we don't know the parameters of the HMM to generate observations in the first place.

For a given HMM representation, in most of the applications, we are always trying to address the following three problems:

  • Evaluation of the model: Given the parameters of the model and the observation sequence, estimating the probability of the sequence
  • Predicting the optimal sequence: Given the parameters of the model and the observation sequence, estimating the most probable sequence of the state sequence that had produced these observations
  • Parameter-learning: Given a sequence of observations, estimating the parameters of the HMM model that generated it

In this section...