Efficient Bayesian modeling of large lattice data using spectral properties of Laplacian matrix

Abstract Spatial data observed on a group of areal units is common in scientific applications. The usual hierarchical approach for modeling this kind of dataset is to introduce a spatial random effect with an autoregressive prior. However, the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme for this hierarchical framework requires the spatial effects to be sampled from their full conditional posteriors one-by-one resulting in poor mixing. More importantly, it makes the model computationally inefficient for datasets with large number of units. In this article, we propose a Bayesian approach that uses the spectral structure of the adjacency to construct a low-rank expansion for modeling spatial dependence. We propose a pair of computationally efficient estimation schemes that select the functions most important to capture the variation in response. Through simulation studies, we validate the computational efficiency as well as predictive accuracy of our method. Finally, we present an important real-world application of the proposed methodology on a massive plant abundance dataset from Cape Floristic Region in South Africa.