A fast solver for the circulant rational covariance extension problem

The rational covariance extension problem is to parametrize the family of rational spectra of bounded degree that matches a given set of covariances. This article treats a circulant version of this problem, where the underlying process is periodic and we seek a spectrum that also matches a set of given cepstral coefficients. The interest in the circulant problem stems partly from the fact that this problem is a natural approximation of the non-periodic problem, but is also a tool in itself for analysing periodic processes. We develop a fast Newton algorithm for computing the solution utilizing the structure of the Hessian. This is done by extending a current algorithm for Toeplitz-plus-Hankel systems to the block-Toeplitz-plus-block-Hankel case. We use this algorithm to reduce the computational complexity of the Newton search from O(n³) to O(n²), where n corresponds to the number of covariances and cepstral coefficients.