Petruţa C. Caragea

Point and Interval Estimation of Variogram Models Using Spatial Empirical Likelihood

We present a spatial blockwise empirical likelihood method for estimating variogram model parameters in the analysis of spatial data on a grid. The method produces point estimators that require no spatial variance estimates to compute, unlike least squares methods for variogram fitting, but are as efficient as the best least squares estimator in large samples. Our approach also produces confidence regions for the variogram, without requiring knowledge of the full joint distribution of the spatial data. In addition, the empirical likelihood formulation extends to spatial regression problems and allows simultaneous inference on both spatial trend and variogram parameters. We examine the asymptotic behavior of the estimator analytically, and investigate its behavior in finite samples through simulation studies.

Exploring dependence with data on spatial lattices.

The application of Markov random field models to problems involving spatial data on lattice systems requires decisions regarding a number of important aspects of model structure. Existing exploratory techniques appropriate for spatial data do not provide direct guidance to an investigator about these decisions. We introduce an exploratory quantity that is directly tied to the structure of Markov random field models based on one-parameter exponential family conditional distributions. This exploratory diagnostic is shown to be a meaningful statistic that can inform decisions involved in modeling spatial structure with statistical dependence terms. In this article, we develop the diagnostic, illustrate its use in guiding modeling decisions with simulated examples, and reexamine a previously published application.

Forecasting seasonal influenza with a state-space SIR model

Seasonal influenza is a serious public health and societal problem due to its consequences resulting from absenteeism, hospitalizations, and deaths. The overall burden of influenza is captured by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions influenza-like illness network, which provides invaluable information about the current incidence. This information is used to provide decision support regarding prevention and response efforts. Despite the relatively rich surveillance data and the recurrent nature of seasonal influenza, forecasting the timing and intensity of seasonal influenza in the U.S. remains challenging because the form of the disease transmission process is uncertain, the disease dynamics are only partially observed, and the public health observations are noisy. Fitting a probabilistic state-space model motivated by a deterministic mathematical model [a susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model] is a promising approach for forecasting seasonal influenza while simultaneously accounting for multiple sources of uncertainty. A significant finding of this work is the importance of thoughtfully specifying the prior, as results critically depend on its specification. Our conditionally specified prior allows us to exploit known relationships between latent SIR initial conditions and parameters and functions of surveillance data. We demonstrate advantages of our approach relative to alternatives via a forecasting comparison using several forecast accuracy metrics.