Trajectory fitting estimators for SPDEs driven by additive noise

In this paper we study the problem of estimating the drift/viscosity coefficient for a large class of linear, parabolic stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) driven by an additive space-time noise. We propose a new class of estimators, called trajectory fitting estimators (TFEs). The estimators are constructed by fitting the observed trajectory with an artificial one, and can be viewed as an analog to the classical least squares estimators from the time-series analysis. As in the existing literature on statistical inference for SPDEs, we take a spectral approach, and assume that we observe the first N Fourier modes of the solution, and we study the consistency and the asymptotic normality of the TFE, as N → ∞ .