  This paper is devoted to adaptive long autoregressive spectral analysis when
(i) very few data are available, (ii) information does exist beforehand
concerning the spectral smoothness and time continuity of the analyzed signals.
The contribution is founded on two papers by Kitagawa and Gersch. The first one
deals with spectral smoothness, in the regularization framework, while the
second one is devoted to time continuity, in the Kalman formalism. The present
paper proposes an original synthesis of the two contributions: a new
regularized criterion is introduced that takes both information into account.
The criterion is efficiently optimized by a Kalman smoother. One of the major
features of the method is that it is entirely unsupervised: the problem of
automatically adjusting the hyperparameters that balance data-based versus
prior-based information is solved by maximum likelihood. The improvement is
quantified in the field of meteorological radar.
