Spatial Lasso With Applications to GIS Model Selection

Geographic information systems (GIS) organize spatial data in multiple two-dimensional arrays called layers. In many applications, a response of interest is observed on a set of sites in the landscape, and it is of interest to build a regression model from the GIS layers to predict the response at unsampled sites. Model selection in this context then consists not only of selecting appropriate layers, but also of choosing appropriate neighborhoods within those layers. We formalize this problem as a linear model and propose the use of Lasso to simultaneously select variables, choose neighborhoods, and estimate parameters. Spatially dependent errors are accounted for using generalized least squares and spatial smoothness in selected coefficients is incorporated through use of a priori spatial covariance structure. This leads to a modification of the Lasso procedure, called spatial Lasso. The spatial Lasso can be implemented by a fast algorithm and it performs well in numerical examples, including an application to prediction of soil moisture. The methodology is also extended to generalized linear models. Supplemental materials including R computer code and data analyzed in this article are available online.