English

Scalable Spatio-Temporal Smoothing via Hierarchical Sparse Cholesky Decomposition

Methodology 2022-07-20 v1 Computation

Abstract

We propose an approximation to the forward-filter-backward-sampler (FFBS) algorithm for large-scale spatio-temporal smoothing. FFBS is commonly used in Bayesian statistics when working with linear Gaussian state-space models, but it requires inverting covariance matrices which have the size of the latent state vector. The computational burden associated with this operation effectively prohibits its applications in high-dimensional settings. We propose a scalable spatio-temporal FFBS approach based on the hierarchical Vecchia approximation of Gaussian processes, which has been previously successfully used in spatial statistics. On simulated and real data, our approach outperformed a low-rank FFBS approximation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.09384,
  title  = {Scalable Spatio-Temporal Smoothing via Hierarchical Sparse Cholesky Decomposition},
  author = {Marcin Jurek and Matthias Katzfuss},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.09384},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-25T01:03:22.632Z