Hidden Markov Model (HMM)
Discover Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), their principles, applications in speech recognition, bioinformatics & AI, and how they infer hidden states.
A Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is a type of statistical AI model used for analyzing sequential data where the underlying system is assumed to be a Markov process with unobserved (hidden) states. The core idea is to make inferences about a sequence of hidden states based on a sequence of observable outputs. HMMs are built on the Markov property, which states that the probability of a future state depends only on the current state, not the entire history of states. This makes HMMs a powerful tool for tasks in fields like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and bioinformatics.
How Hidden Markov Models Work
An HMM consists of several key components that work together to model sequential data:
- Hidden States: These are the unobservable states of the system that the model tries to infer. For example, in weather forecasting, the hidden states might be "Sunny," "Cloudy," or "Rainy."
- Observable Outputs (Emissions): These are the visible data points that each hidden state can produce. Following the weather example, observations could be "High Temperature," "Low Temperature," or "High Humidity."
- Transition Probabilities: These probabilities govern the likelihood of moving from one hidden state to another. For example, there is a certain probability that a "Sunny" day will be followed by a "Cloudy" day.
- Emission Probabilities: These probabilities represent the likelihood of observing a particular output given that the system is in a specific hidden state. For instance, the probability of observing "High Humidity" is likely higher if the hidden state is "Rainy."
To make predictions, HMMs use established algorithms. The Viterbi algorithm is commonly used to find the most likely sequence of hidden states given a sequence of observations. To train the model and learn its probability distributions from training data, the Baum-Welch algorithm is often employed.
Real-World Applications
HMMs have been successfully applied in various domains for decades. Here are a couple of prominent examples:
- Speech Recognition: In classic speech recognition systems, HMMs were instrumental. The hidden states correspond to phonemes (the basic units of sound in a language), and the observable outputs are acoustic features extracted from recorded speech. The HMM's task is to determine the most likely sequence of phonemes from the audio signal, which is then used to identify the spoken words.
- Bioinformatics: HMMs are a cornerstone of computational biology, particularly for gene finding. In this context, hidden states might represent parts of a gene, like "exon" (coding region) or "intron" (non-coding region), while the observations are the sequence of DNA bases (A, C, G, T). By analyzing a long DNA sequence, an HMM can identify the most probable locations of genes. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) details these methods.