An Introduction to Model-Based Geostatistics

Abstract

The term geostatistics identifies the part of spatial statistics which is concerned with continuous spatial variation, in the following sense. The scientific focus is to study a spatial phenomenon, s (x) say, which exists throughout a continuous spatial region A⊂ ℝ 2 and can be treated as if it were a realisation of a stochastic process S (·)={S (x): x∈ A}. In general, S (·) is not directly observable. Instead, the available data consist of measurements Y 1,..., Y n taken at locations x 1,..., xn sampled within A, and Y i is a noisy version of S (xi). We shall …