Francesca P. Carli

Francesca P. Carli, Augusto Ferrante, Michele Pavon et al.

This paper deals with maximum entropy completion of partially specified block-circulant matrices. Since positive definite symmetric circulants happen to be covariance matrices of stationary periodic processes, in particular of stationary reciprocal processes, this problem has applications in signal processing, in particular to image modeling. In fact it is strictly related to maximum likelihood estimation of bilateral AR-type representations of acausal signals subject to certain conditional independence constraints. The maximum entropy completion problem for block-circulant matrices has recently been solved by the authors, although leaving open the problem of an efficient computation of the solution. In this paper, we provide an effcient algorithm for computing its solution which compares very favourably with existing algorithms designed for positive definite matrix extension problems. The proposed algorithm benefits from the analysis of the relationship between our problem and the band-extension problem for block-Toeplitz matrices also developed in this paper.

Tianshi Chen, Tohid Ardeshiri, Francesca P. Carli et al.

The first order stable spline (SS-1) kernel is used extensively in regularized system identification. In particular, the stable spline estimator models the impulse response as a zero-mean Gaussian process whose covariance is given by the SS-1 kernel. In this paper, we discuss the maximum entropy properties of this prior. In particular, we formulate the exact maximum entropy problem solved by the SS-1 kernel without Gaussian and uniform sampling assumptions. Under general sampling schemes, we also explicitly derive the special structure underlying the SS-1 kernel (e.g. characterizing the tridiagonal nature of its inverse), also giving to it a maximum entropy covariance completion interpretation. Along the way similar maximum entropy properties of the Wiener kernel are also given.