On Consistency of a Class of Estimators for Exponential Families of Markov Random Fields on the Lattice

Abstract

We prove strong consistency of a class of maximum objective estimators for exponential parametric families of Markov random fields on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, including both maximum likelihood and pseudolikelihood estimators, using large deviation estimates. We also obtain the optimality property for the maximum likelihood estimator in the sense of Bahadur.