Constructing Priors that Penalize the Complexity of Gaussian Random Fields
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Priors are important for achieving proper posteriors with physically meaningful covariance structures for Gaussian random fields (GRFs) since the likelihood typically only provides limited information about the covariance structure under in-fill asymptotics. We extend the recent penalized complexity prior framework and develop a principled joint prior for the range and the marginal variance of one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional Matérn GRFs with fixed smoothness. The prior is weakly informative and penalizes complexity by shrinking the range toward infinity and the marginal variance toward zero. We propose guidelines for selecting the hyperparameters, and a simulation study shows that the new prior provides a principled alternative to reference priors that can leverage prior knowledge to achieve shorter credible intervals while maintaining good coverage. We extend the prior to a nonstationary GRF parameterized through local ranges and marginal standard deviations, and introduce a scheme for selecting the hyperparameters based on the coverage of the parameters when fitting simulated stationary data. The approach is applied to a dataset of annual precipitation in southern Norway and the scheme for selecting the hyperparameters leads to conservative estimates of nonstationarity and improved predictive performance over the stationary model. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".