The use of the Kalman filter for estimation purposes is not always an easy task despite the obvious advantages in many situations of the state-space representation. This is in part due to the fact that the computation of the corresponding score (gradient of the log-likelihood) is sometimes...

We use a Kalman filter type model of financial markets to extract a global stochastic trend from the discrete non-synchronous data on daily stock market index returns of different stock exchanges. The model is tested for robustness. In addition, we derive “most important” hours of world...