Heterogeneity Pursuit for Spatial Point Pattern with Application to Tree Locations: A Bayesian Semiparametric Recourse

Spatial point pattern data are routinely encountered. A flexible regression model for the underlying intensity is essential to characterizing the spatial point pattern and understanding the impacts of potential risk factors on such pattern. We propose a Bayesian semiparametric regression model where the observed spatial points follow a spatial Poisson process with an intensity function which adjusts a nonparametric baseline intensity with multiplicative covariate effects. The baseline intensity is piecewise constant, approached with a powered Chinese restaurant process prior which prevents an unnecessarily large number of pieces. The parametric regression part allows for variable selection through the spike-slab prior on the regression coefficients. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is developed for the proposed methods. The performance of the methods is validated in an extensive simulation study. In application to the locations of Beilschmiedia pendula trees in the Barro Colorado Island forest dynamics research plot in central Panama, the spatial heterogeneity is attributed to a subset of soil measurements in addition to geographic measurements with a spatially varying baseline intensity.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

Bayesian Spatial Homogeneity Pursuit Regression for Count Value Data

Spatial regression models are ubiquitous in many different areas such as environmental science, geoscience, and public health. Exploring relationships between response variables and covariates with complex spatial patterns is a very important work. In this paper, we propose a novel spatially clustered coefficients regression model for count value data based on nonparametric Bayesian methods. Our proposed method detects the spatial homogeneity of the Poisson regression coefficients. A Markov random field constraint mixture of finite mixtures prior provides a consistent estimator of the number of the clusters of regression coefficients with the geographically neighborhood information. The theoretical properties of our proposed method are established. An efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is developed by using multivariate log gamma distribution as a base distribution. Extensive simulation studies are carried out to examine empirical performance of the proposed method. Additionally, we analyze Georgia premature deaths data as an illustration of the effectiveness of our approach