An Overview of Important Practical Aspects of Continuous-Time ARMA System Identification

The problem of estimating the parameters in continuous-time autoregressive moving average (ARMA) processes from discrete-time data is considered. Both direct and indirect methods are studied, and similarities and differences are discussed. A general discussion of the inherent difficulties of the problem is given together with a comprehensive study on how the choice of the sampling interval influences the estimation result. A special focus is given to how the Cramer-Rao lower bound depends on the sampling interval.