Computable infinite-dimensional filters with applications to discretized diffusion processes

Let us consider a pair signal-observation ((x(n), y(n)), n >= 0) where the unobserved signal (x(n)) is a Markov chain and the observed component is such that, given the whole sequence (x(n)), the random variables (y(n)) are independent and the conditional distribution of y(n) only depends on the corresponding state variable x(n). The main problems raised by these observations are the prediction and filtering of (x(n)). We introduce sufficient conditions allowing us to obtain computable filters using mixtures of distributions. The filter system may be finite or infinite-dimensional. The method is applied to the case where the signal x(n) = X-n Delta is a discrete sampling of a one-dimensional diffusion process: Concrete models are proved to fit in our conditions. Moreover, for these models, exact likelihood inference based on the observation (y(0), ..., y(n)) is feasible. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.