Integrating multi-source geospatial information using Bayesian maximum entropy: A case study on design ground snow load prediction

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.