Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-06-01Epub Date: 2025-03-26DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100894
Kinspride Duah, Yan Sun, Brennan Bean
{"title":"Integrating multi-source geospatial information using Bayesian maximum entropy: A case study on design ground snow load prediction","authors":"Kinspride Duah, Yan Sun, Brennan Bean","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100894","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100894","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Environmental data are often imprecise due to various limitations and uncertainties in the measuring process. As a result, they often consist of a combination of both precise and imprecise information, referred to as hard and soft data, respectively. Often in practice, soft data are characterized as intervals as a simple form to properly preserve the underlying imprecision. Bayesian maximum entropy (BME) is a generalized spatial interpolation method that processes both hard and soft data simultaneously to effectively account for both spatial uncertainty and measurement imprecision. This paper presents a rigorous evaluation to compare the performances of BME and kriging through both simulation and a case study of reliability-targeted design ground snow load (RTDSL) prediction in Utah. The dataset contains a mixture of hard and soft-interval observations, and kriging uses the soft-interval data by extracting the midpoints in addition to the hard data. The cross-validated results show that BME outperforms kriging on multiple error metrics. Specifically for hard data locations where precise observations are known, BME yields a mean error (ME) of 0.0334, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.2309, and a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.2833, whereas kriging produces a ME of 0.1960, MAE of 0.2793, and RMSE of 0.3698. These results highlight the superior prediction accuracy of BME, particularly in the presence of soft data and/or non-Gaussian hard data.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 100894"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143739998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-06-01Epub Date: 2025-03-13DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100891
S. Ward, E.A.K. Cohen, N.M. Adams
{"title":"Functional summary statistics and testing for independence in multi-type point processes on the surface of three dimensional convex shapes","authors":"S. Ward, E.A.K. Cohen, N.M. Adams","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100891","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100891","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The fundamental functional summary statistics used for studying spatial point patterns are developed for marked homogeneous and inhomogeneous point processes on the surface of a sphere. These are extended to point processes on the surface of three dimensional convex shapes given the bijective mapping from the shape to the sphere is known. These functional summary statistics are used to test for independence between the marginals of multi-type spatial point processes with methods for sampling the null distribution developed and discussed. This is illustrated on both simulated data and the RNGC galaxy point pattern, revealing attractive dependencies between different galaxy types.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 100891"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143679461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-06-01Epub Date: 2025-04-25DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100902
Xinyi Lu , Andee Kaplan , Yoichiro Kanno , George Valentine , Jacob M. Rash , Mevin Hooten
{"title":"Stochastic spatial stream networks for scalable inferences of riverscape processes","authors":"Xinyi Lu , Andee Kaplan , Yoichiro Kanno , George Valentine , Jacob M. Rash , Mevin Hooten","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100902","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100902","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Spatial stream networks (SSN) models characterize correlated ecological processes in dendritic ecosystems. Conventional SSN models rely on pre-processed stream networks and point-to-point hydrologic distances. However, this data processing may be labor-intensive and time-consuming over large spatial domains. Therefore, we propose to infer the functional connectivity of stream networks stochastically. Our physically-guided model utilizes the knowledge that water flows from high elevation to low elevation, and flow rate typically increases when two tributaries merge. We also leverage the hierarchical branching architecture of dendritic networks to alleviate computing and reduce uncertainty. Spatial autoregressive models composed of inferred SSNs propagate stochasticity between network connectivity and dynamic ecological processes in a Bayesian framework. We show in simulated examples that our mechanistic model facilitated learning about the functional network and enhanced predictive performance. We also demonstrate our approach in a large-scale case study using native brook trout (<em>Salvelinus fontinalis</em>) count data. A population model based on our stochastic SSN outperformed that with a conventional SSN in predicting abundance and expedited the analysis by circumventing data processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 100902"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143898418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Clustered factor analysis for multivariate spatial data","authors":"Yanxiu Jin , Tomoya Wakayama , Renhe Jiang , Shonosuke Sugasawa","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100889","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100889","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Factor analysis has been extensively used to reveal the dependence structures among multivariate variables, offering valuable insight in various fields. However, it cannot incorporate the spatial heterogeneity that is typically present in spatial data. To address this issue, we introduce an effective method specifically designed to discover the potential dependence structures in multivariate spatial data. Our approach assumes that spatial locations can be approximately divided into a finite number of clusters, with locations within the same cluster sharing similar dependence structures. By leveraging an iterative algorithm that combines spatial clustering with factor analysis, we simultaneously detect spatial clusters and estimate a unique factor model for each cluster. The proposed method is evaluated through comprehensive simulation studies, demonstrating its flexibility. In addition, we apply the proposed method to a dataset of railway station attributes in the Tokyo metropolitan area, highlighting its practical applicability and effectiveness in uncovering complex spatial dependencies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100889"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143508562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-02-24DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100885
Claudio Rubino , Chiara Di Maria , Antonino Abbruzzo , Gioacchino Bono , Germana Garofalo , Giacomo Milisenda , Giada Adelfio
{"title":"Derivative-based spatial mediation with INLA-SPDE","authors":"Claudio Rubino , Chiara Di Maria , Antonino Abbruzzo , Gioacchino Bono , Germana Garofalo , Giacomo Milisenda , Giada Adelfio","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100885","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100885","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In many applied fields, it may be of interest to evaluate mediational mechanisms occurring in spatial domains. The approaches proposed so far in the literature to address this issue deal with areal data and often consider linear models. In this paper, we propose an approach to assess mediation in the presence of geostatistical data by combining the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) with a derivative-based approach for mediation analysis, which allows one to estimate indirect effects also in the case of nonlinear models. We investigate the effect of ignoring spatial processes in the mediator and the outcome models through a simulation study, focusing also on the case of correlated processes. To show the usefulness of our approach, we also provided an ecological application.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100885"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143488347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-01-27DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100881
Fabrizio Durante , Sebastian Fuchs , Roberta Pappadà
{"title":"Clustering of compound events based on multivariate comonotonicity","authors":"Fabrizio Durante , Sebastian Fuchs , Roberta Pappadà","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100881","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100881","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Driven by the goal of generating risk maps for flood events—characterized by various physical variables such as peak flow and volume, and measured at specific geographic locations—this work proposes several dissimilarity functions for use in unsupervised learning problems and, specifically, in clustering algorithms. These dissimilarities are rank-based, relying on the dependence occurring among the random variables involved, and assign the smallest values to pairs of subsets that are <span><math><mi>π</mi></math></span>-comonotonic. This concept is less restrictive than classical comonotonicity but, in the multivariate case, can offer a more intuitive understanding of compound phenomena.</div><div>An application of these measures is presented through the analysis of flood risks using data from the Po river basin, with results compared to similar studies found in the literature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100881"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143151696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-02-18DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100887
Lingling Tian , Chuanhua Wei , Mixia Wu
{"title":"Statistical inference of partially linear time-varying coefficients spatial autoregressive panel data model","authors":"Lingling Tian , Chuanhua Wei , Mixia Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100887","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100887","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates a partially linear spatial autoregressive panel data model that incorporates fixed effects, constant and time-varying regression coefficients, and a time-varying spatial lag coefficient. A two-stage least squares estimation method based on profile local linear dummy variables (2SLS-PLLDV) is proposed to estimate both constant and time-varying coefficients without the need for first differencing. The asymptotic properties of the estimator are derived under certain conditions. Furthermore, a residual-based goodness-of-fit test is constructed for the model, and a residual-based bootstrap method is used to obtain p-values. Simulation studies show the good performance of the proposed method in various scenarios. For illustration, the carbon emission data from Chinese provinces and the public capital productivity data from the United States are analyzed.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100887"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143445043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-01-13DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100880
Roy Cerqueti , Raffaele Mattera
{"title":"Measuring unit relevance and stability in hierarchical spatio-temporal clustering","authors":"Roy Cerqueti , Raffaele Mattera","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100880","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100880","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Understanding the significance of individual data points within clustering structures is critical to effective data analysis. Traditional stability methods, while valuable, often overlook the nuanced impact of individual units, particularly in spatial contexts. In this paper, we explore the concept of unit relevance in clustering analysis, emphasizing its importance in capturing the spatio-temporal nature of the clustering problem. We propose a simple measure of unit relevance, the Unit Relevance Index (URI), and define an overall measure of clustering stability based on the aggregation of computed URIs. Considering two experiments on real datasets with geo-referenced time series, we find that the use of spatial constraints in the clustering task yields more stable results. Therefore, the inclusion of the spatial dimension can be seen as a way to stabilize the clustering.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100880"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143151695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100884
Toshiki Sakai , Jun Tsuchida , Hiroshi Yadohisa
{"title":"Bayesian geographically weighted regression using Fused Lasso prior","authors":"Toshiki Sakai , Jun Tsuchida , Hiroshi Yadohisa","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100884","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100884","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A main purpose of spatial data analysis is to predict the objective variable for the unobserved locations. Although Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) is often used for this purpose, estimation instability proves to be an issue. To address this issue, Bayesian Geographically Weighted Regression (BGWR) has been proposed. In BGWR, by setting the same prior distribution for all locations, the coefficients’ estimation stability is improved. However, when observation locations’ density is spatially different, these methods do not sufficiently consider the similarity of coefficients among locations. Moreover, the prediction accuracy of these methods becomes worse. To solve these issues, we propose Bayesian Geographically Weighted Sparse Regression (BGWSR) that uses Bayesian Fused Lasso for the prior distribution of the BGWR coefficients. Constraining the parameters to have the same values at adjacent locations is expected to improve the prediction accuracy at locations with a low number of adjacent locations. Furthermore, from the predictive distribution, it is also possible to evaluate the uncertainty of the predicted value of the objective variable. By examining numerical studies, we confirmed that BGWSR has better prediction performance than the existing methods (GWR and BGWR) when the density of observation locations is spatial difference. Finally, the BGWSR is applied to land price data in Tokyo. Thus, the results suggest that BGWSR has better prediction performance and smaller uncertainty than existing methods.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100884"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143387115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spatial StatisticsPub Date : 2025-04-01Epub Date: 2025-01-10DOI: 10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100879
Garry Jacyna, Damon Frezza, David M. Slater, James R. Thompson
{"title":"The Multifractal Gaussian Mixture Model for unsupervised segmentation of complex data sets","authors":"Garry Jacyna, Damon Frezza, David M. Slater, James R. Thompson","doi":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100879","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.spasta.2025.100879","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We derive the Multifractal Gaussian Mixture Model algorithm for decomposing data sets into different multifractal regimes building on the empirical observation that simulated multifractals have log wavelet leaders that are well-approximated by a Gaussian distribution. We test the algorithm on composite images constructed from multifractal random walks with known multifractal spectra. The algorithm is able to correctly segment the pixels corresponding to different multifractals when the constituent multifractals are most distinct from each other. It also estimates the multifractal parameters with minimal error when compared to the theoretical spectra used to generate the original multifractal random walks. We also apply the algorithm to satellite images with varying degrees of cloud cover taken from the LandSat 8 Cloud Validation Data set. The algorithm is able to segment the pixels into their corresponding cloud mask category, and it detects different texture and features in the images that are unrelated to clouds. The results indicate that the Multifractal Gaussian Mixture Model algorithm is well-suited for semi-automated unsupervised data segmentation when the data being analyzed exhibit complex, scale-invariant characteristics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48771,"journal":{"name":"Spatial Statistics","volume":"66 ","pages":"Article 100879"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143151694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"数学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}