English

Joint Variable Selection of both Fixed and Random Effects for Gaussian Process-based Spatially Varying Coefficient Models

Methodology 2021-02-12 v2

Abstract

Spatially varying coefficient (SVC) models are a type of regression model for spatial data where covariate effects vary over space. If there are several covariates, a natural question is which covariates have a spatially varying effect and which not. We present a new variable selection approach for Gaussian process-based SVC models. It relies on a penalized maximum likelihood estimation (PMLE) and allows variable selection both with respect to fixed effects and Gaussian process random effects. We validate our approach both in a simulation study as well as a real world data set. Our novel approach shows good selection performance in the simulation study. In the real data application, our proposed PMLE yields sparser SVC models and achieves a smaller information criterion than classical MLE. In a cross-validation applied on the real data, we show that sparser PML estimated SVC models are on par with ML estimated SVC models with respect to predictive performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.01932,
  title  = {Joint Variable Selection of both Fixed and Random Effects for Gaussian Process-based Spatially Varying Coefficient Models},
  author = {Jakob A. Dambon and Fabio Sigrist and Reinhard Furrer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.01932},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

26 pages including appendix. Containing 6 figures and 6 tables. Updated Declarations

R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:49:50.359Z