A Spectral Algorithm for Inference in Hidden semi-Markov Models

Hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs) are latent variable models which allow latent state persistence and can be viewed as a generalization of the popular hidden Markov models (HMMs). In this paper, we introduce a novel spectral algorithm to perform inference in HSMMs. Unlike expectation maximization (EM), our approach correctly estimates the probability of given observation sequence based on a set of training sequences. Our approach is based on estimating certain sample moments, whose order depends only logarithmically on the maximum length of the hidden state persistence. Moreover, the algorithm requires only a few spectral decompositions and is therefore computationally efficient. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real data demonstrate the promise of the algorithm.