Project R-3159
Title
Statistical methods for the analysis of surveys with an informative spatio-temporal sampling design. (Research)
Abstract
Investigation of spatio-temporal trends involves the fitting of a spatial and temporal process to sampled
subjects at different geographical locations. Preferential sampling arises when the process that determines the
data locations and the process being modeled are stochastically dependent. Conventional statistical methods do
not account for the sampling design and assume that the sampling is non-preferential. This however, can lead
to seriously biased estimates. In this project, methods will be developed that account for the informative
sampling design based on jointly analyzing the sampling- and data-process and based on weighted versions of
the data-process distribution. To understand how the sampling design effects the inference on parameters of
interest, the ignorability of the spatio-temporal sampling design with respect to the inferential framework will
be investigated. Also, a test for ignorability will be proposed in order to know when we can ignore the sampling
design and restrict attention to the conventional statistical methods. This project will study the statistical
theoretical properties of spatio-temporal sampling design, and will illustrate the studied methodology using
different case studies.
Period of project
01 October 2011 - 30 September 2015