Hi, All, This is the first time I seriously use this package. However, I am confused that the result is quite unstable. Maybe I wrote something wrong in the code? So could anybody give me some hint? Many thanks. My test model is really simple. Y_t = X_t * a_t + noise(V),(no Intercept here) a_t = a_{t-1} + noise(W) I first run the following code: (I shall provide data at the end of the mail) BuildMod <- function(x){ return(dlm( m0 = x[1], C0 = x[2], FF = 1, GG = 1, V = x[3], W = x[4], JFF = 1, X = X )) } ModFit <- dlmMLE(Y,rep(1,4),BuildMod,debug=T) dlmMod <- BuildMod(ModFit$par) V <- dlmMod$V W <- dlmMod$W ModFilt <- dlmFilter(Y,dlmMod) v <- tail(dlmSvd2var(ModFilt$U.C,ModFilt$D.C),1) m <- tail(ModFilt$m,1) The results are: V = 5.945003e-05 W = 0.0003086623 v = 9.850526e-05 (the estimated variance for a_t after we observe the last pair of observations) m = -0.02965614 (the estimated mean for a_t after we observe the last pair of observations) Since I observe that all the numbers are quite small, I re-estimate the whole thing using a smaller starting value, ie., ModFit <- dlmMLE(Y,rep(0.1,4),BuildMod,debug=T) I was hoping to get a better estimate with a staring value closer to the final estimates and checkk the robustness of the result. However, I got the following message: Error in dlm(m0 = x[1], C0 = x[2], FF = 1, GG = 1, V = x[3], W = x[4], : C0 is not a valid variance matrix I do not know exactly how to debug this. It seems to me that during MLE, somehow the C0 value was turned into a negative number. This is quite scary, So would anybody give me some hints? Thanks a lot. Here is the data for Y, 0.0125678739370109 -0.00241285475528163 0.00386919876129071 -0.00352839097011217 0.00285344714211614 0.00374266510625097 0.00797807743013259 -0.00543459628953192 -0.0138447399853609 -0.0102614592879934 -0.0225111772602310 -0.0127304918143123 -0.00730849659351113 -0.0206703167742092 0.0228898867615212 -0.000489089315662759 0.00760340725359960 And here is the data for X 0.481797086735748 -0.336701996049702 -0.403677908907445 -0.660006432637389 -0.598885119922226 -0.386026586737966 -0.861884498592061 -0.575467614543903 -1.09697129563504 0.156970856187597 0.816563280464663 0.223472270913202 -0.901251445288375 0.402507298840520 0.655744153537491 1.97576880567968 1.05416962424537 0.128426774782304 0.0930179549205073 -0.120974956861827 0.446329808606182 1.15541338624045 0.658459632511477 [[alternative HTML version deleted]]