R Statistics Cookbook

An introductory hidden Markov model

So far in this book, we have worked with observable variables, such as prices or quantities. But what happens when we have an unobserved variable? Let's suppose that we observe the number of people that walk over a street that has an underground station. This variable can, in principle, be modeled as a Poisson random variable (since it is count data). The number of people walking over this street depends on many variables, among them whether the station is open or closed. Let's further assume that we don't observe whether the station is open or not. We want to estimate whether the station is open or not based on the number of people that we observe.

It's tempting to model the station status based on the ...