We consider a class of diffusion processes with finite-dimensional parameters and partially observed at discrete time instances. We propose a methodology to unbiasedly estimate the expectation of a given functional of the diffusion process conditional on parameters and data. When these unbiased estimators with appropriately chosen functionals are employed within an expectation-maximization algorithm or a stochastic gradient method, this enables statistical inference using the maximum likelihood or Bayesian framework. Compared to existing approaches, the use of our unbiased estimators allows one to remove any time-discretization bias and Markov chain Monte Carlo burn-in bias. Central to our methodology is a novel and natural combination of multilevel randomization schemes and unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, and the development of new couplings of multiple conditional particle filters. We establish under assumptions that our estimators are unbiased and have finite variance. We illustrate various aspects of our method on an Ornstein--Uhlenbeck model, a logistic diffusion model for population dynamics, and a neural network model for grid cells.

This paper is concerned with online filtering of discretely observed nonlinear diffusion processes. Our approach is based on the fully adapted auxiliary particle filter, which involves Doob's $h$-transforms that are typically intractable. We propose a computational framework to approximate these $h$-transforms by solving the underlying backward Kolmogorov equations using nonlinear Feynman-Kac formulas and neural networks. The methodology allows one to train a locally optimal particle filter prior to the data-assimilation procedure. Numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed approach can be orders of magnitude more efficient than state-of-the-art particle filters in the regime of highly informative observations, when the observations are extreme under the model, and if the state dimension is large.

Progressively applying Gaussian noise transforms complex data distributions to approximately Gaussian. Reversing this dynamic defines a generative model. When the forward noising process is given by a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE), Song et al (2021) demonstrate how the time inhomogeneous drift of the associated reverse-time SDE may be estimated using score-matching. A limitation of this approach is that the forward-time SDE must be run for a sufficiently long time for the final distribution to be approximately Gaussian. In contrast, solving the Schrödinger Bridge (SB) problem, i.e. an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem on path spaces, yields diffusions which generate samples from the data distribution in finite time. We present Diffusion SB (DSB), an original approximation of the Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) procedure to solve the SB problem, and provide theoretical analysis along with generative modeling experiments. The first DSB iteration recovers the methodology proposed by Song et al. (2021), with the flexibility of using shorter time intervals, as subsequent DSB iterations reduce the discrepancy between the final-time marginal of the forward (resp. backward) SDE with respect to the prior (resp. data) distribution. Beyond generative modeling, DSB offers a widely applicable computational optimal transport tool as the continuous state-space analogue of the popular Sinkhorn algorithm (Cuturi, 2013).

We propose a general statistical framework for clustering multiple time series that exhibit nonlinear dynamics into an a-priori-unknown number of sub-groups. Our motivation comes from neuroscience, where an important problem is to identify, within a large assembly of neurons, subsets that respond similarly to a stimulus or contingency. Upon modeling the multiple time series as the output of a Dirichlet process mixture of nonlinear state-space models, we derive a Metropolis-within-Gibbs algorithm for full Bayesian inference that alternates between sampling cluster assignments and sampling parameter values that form the basis of the clustering. The Metropolis step employs recent innovations in particle-based methods. We apply the framework to clustering time series acquired from the prefrontal cortex of mice in an experiment designed to characterize the neural underpinnings of fear.