Unifying Compactly Supported and Matern Covariance Functions in Spatial Statistics

Abstract: The Mat{\'e}rn family of covariance functions has played a central role in spatial statistics for decades, being a flexible parametric class with one parameter determining the smoothness of the paths of the underlying spatial field. This paper proposes a new family of spatial covariance functions, which stems from a reparameterization of the generalized Wendland family. As for the Mat{\'e}rn case, the new class allows for a continuous parameterization of the smoothness of the underlying Gaussian random field, being additionally compactly supported. More importantly, we show that the proposed covariance family generalizes the Mat{\'e}rn model which is attained as a special limit case. The practical implication of our theoretical results questions the effective flexibility of the Mat{\'e}rn covariance from modeling and computational viewpoints. Our numerical experiments elucidate the speed of convergence of the proposed model to the Mat{\'e}rn model. We also inspect the level of sparseness of the associated (inverse) covariance matrix and the asymptotic distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator under increasing and fixed domain asymptotics. The effectiveness of our proposal is illustrated by analyzing a georeferenced dataset on maximum temperatures over the southeastern United States, and performing a re-analysis of a large spatial point referenced dataset of yearly total precipitation anomalies