An Explicit Link between Gaussian Fields and Gaussian Markov Random Fields: The Stochastic Partial Differential Equation Approach

Clicks: 14
ID: 290417
2011
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Steady

Ranked #44 of 147 articles by views in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B (Statistical Methodology)

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 147 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Abstract
Summary Continuously indexed Gaussian fields (GFs) are the most important ingredient in spatial statistical modelling and geostatistics. The specification through the covariance function gives an intuitive interpretation of the field properties. On the computational side, GFs are hampered with the big n problem, since the cost of factorizing dense matrices is cubic in the dimension. Although computational power today is at an all time high, this fact seems still to be a computational bottleneck in many applications. Along with GFs, there is the class of Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) which are discretely indexed. The Markov property makes the precision matrix involved sparse, which enables the use of numerical algorithms for sparse matrices, that for fields in ℝ2 only use the square root of the time required by general algorithms. The specification of a GMRF is through its full conditional distributions but its marginal properties are not transparent in such a parameterization. We show that, using an approximate stochastic weak solution to (linear) stochastic partial differential equations, we can, for some GFs in the Matérn class, provide an explicit link, for any triangulation of ℝd, between GFs and GMRFs, formulated as a basis function representation. The consequence is that we can take the best from the two worlds and do the modelling by using GFs but do the computations by using GMRFs. Perhaps more importantly, our approach generalizes to other covariance functions generated by SPDEs, including oscillating and non-stationary GFs, as well as GFs on manifolds. We illustrate our approach by analysing global temperature data with a non-stationary model defined on a sphere.
Reference Key
openalex_W1837874438 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Finn Lindgren, Håvard Rue, Johan Lindström
Journal Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B (Statistical Methodology)
Year 2011
DOI
10.1111/j.1467-9868.2011.00777.x
URL
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.