RAO-BLACKWELLIZED PARTICLE MCMC FOR PARAMETER ESTIMATION IN SPATIO-TEMPORAL GAUSSIAN PROCESSES

In this paper, we consider parameter estimation in latent, spatio-temporal Gaussian processes using particle Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In particular, we use spectral decomposition of the covariance function to obtain a high-dimensional state-space representation of the Gaussian processes, which is assumed to be observed through a nonlinear non-Gaussian likelihood. We develop a Rao-Blackwellized particle Gibbs sampler to sample the state trajectory and show how to sample the hyperparameters and possible parameters in the likelihood. The proposed method is evaluated on a spatio-temporal population model and the predictive performance is evaluated using leave-one-out cross-validation.