CIR bridge for modeling of fish migration on sub-hourly scale

Bridges, which are stochastic processes with pinned initial and terminal conditions, have recently been applied to various problems. We show that a bridge based on the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross process, called a CIR bridge in this paper, reasonably models the intraday number of migrating fish at an observation point in a river. The studied fish migrates between sunrise and sunset each day, which are considered the initial and terminal times, respectively. The CIR bridge is well-defined as a unique pathwise continuous solution to a stochastic differential equation with unbounded drift and diffusion coefficients and potentially represents the on–off intermittency of the fish count data. Our bridge is theoretically novel in that it admits closed-form time-dependent averages and variances, with which the model parameters can be identified efficiently, and is computable by a recently-developed one-step numerical method. The CIR bridge is applied to the sub-hourly migration data of the diadromous fish Plecoglossus altivelis altivelis in the Nagara River, Japan, from February to June.