A variety of latent Markov models (Mews, Koslik, and Langrock 2024), including hidden Markov models (HMMs), hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs), state-space models (SSMs) and continuous-time variants can be formulated and estimated within the same framework via directly maximising the likelihood function using the so-called forward algorithm (Zucchini, MacDonald, and Langrock 2016). Applied researchers often need custom models that standard software does not easily support. Writing tailored R
code offers flexibility but suffers from slow estimation speeds. This R
package solves these issues by providing easy-to-use functions (written in C++ for speed) for common tasks like the forward algorithm. These functions can be combined into custom models in a Lego-type approach, offering up to 10-20 times faster estimation via standard numerical optimisers. In its most recent iteration, LaMa
allows for automatic differentiation with the RTMB
package which drastically increases speed and accuracy even more.
The most important families of functions are
the
forward
family that calculates the log-likelihood for various different models,the
tpm
family for calculating transition probability matrices,the
stationary
family to compute stationary and periodically stationary distributionsas well as the
stateprobs
andviterbi
families for local and global decoding.
Installation
You can install the released package version from CRAN with:
install.packages("LaMa")
or the development version from Github:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("janoleko/LaMa")
Package documentation
To aid in building fully custom likelihood functions, this package contains several vignettes that demonstrate how to simulate data from and estimate a wide range of models using the functions included in this package.
HMMs, from simple to complex:
- Introduction to LaMa
- Inhomogeneous HMMs with covariate effects
- Longitudinal data
- Periodic HMMs
- LaMa and RTMB
- Penalised splines
Other latent Markov model classes:
Introductory example: Homogeneous HMM
We analyse the trex
data set contained in the package. It contains hourly step lengths of a Tyrannosaurus rex, living 66 million years ago. To these data, we fit a simple 2-state HMM with state-dependent gamma distributions for the step-lengths.
library(LaMa)
#> Loading required package: RTMB
head(trex, 3)
#> tod step angle state
#> 1 9 0.3252437 NA 1
#> 2 10 0.2458265 2.234562 1
#> 3 11 0.2173252 -2.262418 1
We start by defining the negative log-likelihood function. This is made really convenient by the functions tpm()
which computes the transition probability matrix via the multinomial logit link, stationary()
which computes the stationary distribution of the Markov chain and forward()
which calculates the log-likelihood via the forward algorithm.
nll = function(par, step){
# parameter transformations for unconstrained optimisation
Gamma = tpm(par[1:2]) # multinomial logit link
delta = stationary(Gamma) # stationary HMM
mu = exp(par[3:4])
sigma = exp(par[5:6])
# calculate all state-dependent probabilities
allprobs = matrix(1, length(step), 2)
ind = which(!is.na(step))
for(j in 1:2) allprobs[ind,j] = dgamma2(step[ind], mu[j], sigma[j])
# simple forward algorithm to calculate log-likelihood
-forward(delta, Gamma, allprobs)
}
To fit the model, we define the intial parameter vector and numerically optimise the above function using nlm()
:
par = c(-2,-2, # initial tpm params (logit-scale)
log(c(0.3, 2.5)), # initial means for step length (log-transformed)
log(c(0.2, 1.5))) # initial sds for step length (log-transformed)
system.time(
mod <- nlm(nll, par, step = trex$step)
)
#> user system elapsed
#> 0.365 0.009 0.376
Really fast for 10.000 data points!
After tranforming the unconstrained parameters to working parameters using tpm()
and stationary()
, we can visualise the results:
# transform parameters to working
Gamma = tpm(mod$estimate[1:2])
delta = stationary(Gamma) # stationary HMM
mu = exp(mod$estimate[3:4])
sigma = exp(mod$estimate[5:6])
hist(trex$step, prob = TRUE, bor = "white", breaks = 40, main = "", xlab = "step length")
curve(delta[1] * dgamma2(x, mu[1], sigma[1]), add = TRUE, lwd = 2, col = "orange", n=500)
curve(delta[2] * dgamma2(x, mu[2], sigma[2]), add = TRUE, lwd = 2, col = "deepskyblue", n=500)
legend("topright", col = c("orange", "deepskyblue"), lwd = 2, bty = "n", legend = c("state 1", "state 2"))