Drought is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that significantly affects human and environmental activity, and can be considered one of the most widespread and destructive natural disasters.

Statistical models called hidden Markov models are a recurring theme in computational biology. What are hidden Markov models, and why are they so useful for so many different problems?

Nonparametric identification and maximum likelihood estimation for finite-state hidden Markov models are investigated. We obtain identification of the parameters as well as the order of the Markov ...