56,913 research outputs found
High-Dimensional Bayesian Geostatistics
With the growing capabilities of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and
user-friendly software, statisticians today routinely encounter geographically
referenced data containing observations from a large number of spatial
locations and time points. Over the last decade, hierarchical spatiotemporal
process models have become widely deployed statistical tools for researchers to
better understand the complex nature of spatial and temporal variability.
However, fitting hierarchical spatiotemporal models often involves expensive
matrix computations with complexity increasing in cubic order for the number of
spatial locations and temporal points. This renders such models unfeasible for
large data sets. This article offers a focused review of two methods for
constructing well-defined highly scalable spatiotemporal stochastic processes.
Both these processes can be used as "priors" for spatiotemporal random fields.
The first approach constructs a low-rank process operating on a
lower-dimensional subspace. The second approach constructs a Nearest-Neighbor
Gaussian Process (NNGP) that ensures sparse precision matrices for its finite
realizations. Both processes can be exploited as a scalable prior embedded
within a rich hierarchical modeling framework to deliver full Bayesian
inference. These approaches can be described as model-based solutions for big
spatiotemporal datasets. The models ensure that the algorithmic complexity has
floating point operations (flops), where the number of spatial
locations (per iteration). We compare these methods and provide some insight
into their methodological underpinnings
Non-parametric Estimation of Stochastic Differential Equations with Sparse Gaussian Processes
The application of Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) to the analysis
of temporal data has attracted increasing attention, due to their ability to
describe complex dynamics with physically interpretable equations. In this
paper, we introduce a non-parametric method for estimating the drift and
diffusion terms of SDEs from a densely observed discrete time series. The use
of Gaussian processes as priors permits working directly in a function-space
view and thus the inference takes place directly in this space. To cope with
the computational complexity that requires the use of Gaussian processes, a
sparse Gaussian process approximation is provided. This approximation permits
the efficient computation of predictions for the drift and diffusion terms by
using a distribution over a small subset of pseudo-samples. The proposed method
has been validated using both simulated data and real data from economy and
paleoclimatology. The application of the method to real data demonstrates its
ability to capture the behaviour of complex systems
A generalized Gaussian process model for computer experiments with binary time series
Non-Gaussian observations such as binary responses are common in some
computer experiments. Motivated by the analysis of a class of cell adhesion
experiments, we introduce a generalized Gaussian process model for binary
responses, which shares some common features with standard GP models. In
addition, the proposed model incorporates a flexible mean function that can
capture different types of time series structures. Asymptotic properties of the
estimators are derived, and an optimal predictor as well as its predictive
distribution are constructed. Their performance is examined via two simulation
studies. The methodology is applied to study computer simulations for cell
adhesion experiments. The fitted model reveals important biological information
in repeated cell bindings, which is not directly observable in lab experiments.Comment: 49 pages, 4 figure
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