Exploring the Efficacy of Statistical and Deep Learning Methods for Large Spatial Datasets: A Case Study

Increasingly large and complex spatial datasets pose massive inferential challenges due to high computational and storage costs. Our study is motivated by the KAUST Competition on Large Spatial Datasets 2023, which tasked participants with estimating spatial covariance-related parameters and predicting values at testing sites, along with uncertainty estimates. We compared various statistical and deep learning approaches through cross-validation and ultimately selected the Vecchia approximation technique for model fitting. To overcome the constraints in the R package GpGp, which lacked support for fitting zero-mean Gaussian processes and direct uncertainty estimation—two things that are necessary for the competition, we developed additional R functions. Besides, we implemented certain subsampling-based approximations and parametric smoothing for skewed sampling distributions of the estimators. Our team DesiBoys secured the first position in two out of four sub-competitions and the second position in the other two, validating the effectiveness of our proposed strategies. Moreover, we extended our evaluation to a large real spatial satellite-derived dataset on total precipitable water, where we compared the predictive performances of different models using multiple diagnostics.