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Approximate Likelihood for Large Irregularly Spaced Spatial Data
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Approximate Likelihood for Large Irregularly Spaced Spatial Data

Montserrat Fuentes
Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol.102(477), pp.321-331
0
2007
DOI: 10.1198/016214506000000852
PMCID: PMC2601654
PMID: 19079638
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/2601654View
Open Access

Abstract

Likelihood approaches for large, irregularly spaced spatial datasets are often very difficult, if not infeasible, to implement due to computational limitations. Even when we can assume normality, exact calculations of the likelihood for a Gaussian spatial process observed at n locations requires O(n 3 ) operations. We present a version of Whittle's approximation to the Gaussian log-likelihood for spatial regular lattices with missing values and for irregularly spaced datasets. This method requires O(nlog 2 n) operations and does not involve calculating determinants. We present simulations and theoretical results to show the benefits and the performance of the spatial likelihood approximation method presented here for spatial irregularly spaced datasets and lattices with missing values. We apply these methods to estimate the spatial structure of sea surface temperatures using satellite data with missing values.
Sea surface temperatures Covariance Satellite data Spatial likelihood Anisotropy Fourier transform Periodogram Spatial statistics

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