Profile likelihoods for parameters in trans-Gaussian geostatistical models

Abstract

Profile likelihoods are rarely used in geostatistical models due to the computational burden imposed by repeated decompositions of large variance matrices. Accounting for uncertainty in covariance parameters can be highly consequential in geostatistical models as some covariance parameters are poorly identified, the problem is severe enough that the differentiability parameter of the Matern correlation function is typically treated as fixed. The problem is compounded with anisotropic spatial models as there are two additional parameters to consider. In this paper, we make the following contributions: Firstly, a methodology is created for profile likelihoods for Gaussian spatial models with Matérn family of correlation functions, including anisotropic models. This methodology adopts a novel reparameterization for generation of representative points, and uses GPUs for parallel profile likelihoods computation in software implementation. Then, we show the profile likelihood of the Matérn shape parameter is often quite flat but still identifiable, it can usually rule out very small values. Finally, simulation studies and applications on real data examples show that profile-based confidence intervals of covariance parameters and regression parameters have superior coverage to the traditional standard Wald type confidence intervals.