  Poyiadjis et al. (2011) show how particle methods can be used to estimate
both the score and the observed information matrix for state space models.
These methods either suffer from a computational cost that is quadratic in the
number of particles, or produce estimates whose variance increases
quadratically with the amount of data. This paper introduces an alternative
approach for estimating these terms at a computational cost that is linear in
the number of particles. The method is derived using a combination of kernel
density estimation, to avoid the particle degeneracy that causes the
quadratically increasing variance, and Rao-Blackwellisation. Crucially, we show
the method is robust to the choice of bandwidth within the kernel density
estimation, as it has good asymptotic properties regardless of this choice. Our
estimates of the score and observed information matrix can be used within both
online and batch procedures for estimating parameters for state space models.
Empirical results show improved parameter estimates compared to existing
methods at a significantly reduced computational cost. Supplementary materials
including code are available.
