Date Available

5-9-2013

Year of Publication

2013

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Statistics

First Advisor

Dr. Mai Zhou

Second Advisor

Dr. Yanbing Zheng

Abstract

In many areas of the agriculture, biological, physical and social sciences, spatial lattice data are becoming increasingly common. In addition, a large amount of lattice data shows not only visible spatial pattern but also temporal pattern (see, Zhu et al. 2005). An interesting problem is to develop a model to systematically model the relationship between the response variable and possible explanatory variable, while accounting for space and time effect simultaneously.

Spatial-temporal linear model and the corresponding likelihood-based statistical inference are important tools for the analysis of spatial-temporal lattice data. We propose a general asymptotic framework for spatial-temporal linear models and investigate the property of maximum likelihood estimates under such framework. Mild regularity conditions on the spatial-temporal weight matrices will be put in order to derive the asymptotic properties (consistency and asymptotic normality) of maximum likelihood estimates. A simulation study is conducted to examine the finite-sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimates.

For spatial data, aside from traditional likelihood-based method, a variety of literature has discussed Bayesian approach to estimate the correlation (auto-covariance function) among spatial data, especially Zheng et al. (2010) proposed a nonparametric Bayesian approach to estimate a spectral density. We will also discuss nonparametric Bayesian approach in analyzing spatial data. We will propose a general procedure for constructing a multivariate Feller prior and establish its theoretical property as a nonparametric prior. A blocked Gibbs sampling algorithm is also proposed for computation since the posterior distribution is analytically manageable.

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