Stilt: Easy Emulation of Time Series AR(1) Computer Model Output in Multidimensional Parameter Space

Statistically approximating or “emulating” time series model output in parameter space is a common problem in climate science and other fields. There are many packages for spatio-temporal modeling. However, they often lack focus on time series, and exhibit statistical complexity. Here, we present the R package stilt designed for simplified AR(1) time series Gaussian process emulation, and provide examples relevant to climate modelling. Notably absent is Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation – a challenging concept to many scientists. We keep the number of user choices to a minimum. Hence, the package can be useful pedagogically, while still applicable to real life emulation problems. We provide functions for emulator cross-validation, empirical coverage, prediction, as well as response surface plotting. While the examples focus on climate model emulation, the emulator is general and can be also used for kriging spatio-temporal data.

Roman Olson , Kelsey L. Ruckert , Won Chang , Klaus Keller , Murali Haran , Soon-Il An
2018-12-07

Supplementary materials

Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2018-049.zip

CRAN packages used

gstat, mlegp, spBayes, ramps, spTimer, RandomFields, stilt, fields, maps, spam, dotCall64

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Spatial, SpatioTemporal, Bayesian, Multivariate, TimeSeries

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Olson, et al., "Stilt: Easy Emulation of Time Series AR(1) Computer Model Output in Multidimensional Parameter Space", The R Journal, 2018

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2018-049,
  author = {Olson, Roman and Ruckert, Kelsey L. and Chang, Won and Keller, Klaus and Haran, Murali and An, Soon-Il},
  title = {Stilt: Easy Emulation of Time Series AR(1) Computer Model Output in Multidimensional Parameter Space},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2018},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-049},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2018-049},
  volume = {10},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {209-225}
}