Estimation of slowly varying model parameters/unmeasured disturbances is of paramount importance in process monitoring, fault diagnosis, model based advanced control and online optimization. The conventional approach to estimate drifting parameters is to artificially model them as a random walk process and estimate them simultaneously with the states. However, this may lead to a poorly conditioned problem, where the tuning of the random walk model becomes a non-trivial exercise. In this work, the moving window parameter estimator of Huang et al. [1] is recast as a moving window maximum likelihood (ML) estimator. The state can be estimated within the window using any recursive Bayesian estimator. It is assumed that, when the model parameters are perfectly known, the innovation sequence generated by the chosen Bayesian estimator is a Gaussian white noise process and is further used to construct a likelihood function that treats the model parameters as unknowns. This leads to a well conditioned problem where the only tuning parameter is the length of the moving window, which is much easier to select than selecting the covariance of the random walk model. The ML formulation is further modified to develop a maximum a posteriori (MAP) cost function by including arrival cost for the parameter. Efficacy of the proposed ML and MAP formulations has been demonstrated by conducting simulation studies and experimental evaluation. Analysis of the simulation and experimental results reveals that the proposed moving window ML and MAP estimators are capable of tracking the drifting parameters/unmeasured disturbances fairly accurately even when the measurements are available at multiple rates and with variable time delays. (c) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.