Estimation for Markov Chains with Periodically Missing Observations

When we observe a stationary time series with observations missing at periodic time points, we can still estimate its marginal distribution well, but the dependence structure of the time series may not be recoverable at all, or the usual estimators may have much larger variance than in the fully observed case. We show how non-parametric estimators can often be improved by adding unbiased estimators. We focus on a simple setting, first-order Markov chains on a finite state space, and an observation pattern in which a fixed number of consecutive observations is followed by an observation gap of fixed length, say workdays and weekends. The new estimators perform astonishingly well in some cases, as illustrated with simulations. The approach extends to continuous state space and to higher-order Markov chains.