An R Package for Spatio-Temporal Change of Support
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Spatio-temporal change of support (STCOS) methods are designed for statistical inference and prediction on spatial and/or temporal domains which differ from the domains on which the data were observed. Bradley, Wikle, and Holan (2015; Stat) introduced a parsimonious class of Bayesian hierarchical spatio-temporal models for STCOS for Gaussian data through a motivating application involving the American Community Survey (ACS), an ongoing survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau that measures key socioeconomic and demographic variables for various populations in the United States. Importantly, their methodology provides ACS data-users a principled approach to estimating variables of interest, along with associated measures of uncertainty, on customized geographies and/or time periods. In this work, we develop an R package to make the methodology broadly accessible to federal statistical agencies, such as the Census Bureau, the ACS data-user community, and to the general R-user community. The package is illustrated through a detailed case-study based on real data.
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