Many physical/biological processes involve variability over both space and time. As a result of difficulties caused by large datasets and the modelling of space, time and spatio-temporal interactions, traditional space-time methods are limited. In this paper, we present an approach to space-time prediction that achieves dimension reduction and uses a statistical model that is temporally dynamic and spatially descriptive. That is, it exploits the unidirectional flow of time, in an autoregressive framework, and is spatially `descriptive' in that the autoregressive process is spatially coloured. With the inclusion of a measurement equation, this formulation naturally leads to the development of a spatio-temporal Kalman filter that achieves dimension reduction in the analysis of large spatio-temporal datasets. Unlike other recent space-time Kalman filters, our model also allows a non-dynamic spatial component. The method is applied to a dataset of near-surface winds over the topical Pacific ocean. Spatial predictions with this dataset are improved by considering the additional non-dynamic spatial process. The improvement becomes more pronounced as the signal-to-noise ratio decreases.
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Biometrika
© 1999 Biometrika Trust
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