A filtering-based clustering algorithm for improving spatio-temporal kriging interpolation accuracy

Geostatistical interpolation is the process that uses existing data and statistical models as inputs to predict data in unobserved spatio-temporal contexts as output. Kriging is a well-known geostatistical interpolation method that minimizes mean square error of prediction. The result interpolated by Kriging is accurate when consistency of statistical properties in data is assumed. However, without this assumption, Kriging interpolation has poor accuracy. To address this problem, this paper presents a new filtering-based clustering algorithm that partitions data into clusters such that the interpolation error within each cluster is significantly reduced, which in turn improves the overall accuracy. Comparisons to traditional Kriging are made with two real-world datasets using two error criteria: normalized mean square error(NMSE) and χ² test statistics for normalized deviation measurement. Our method has reduced NMSE by more than 50% for both datasets over traditional Kriging. Moreover, χ² tests have also shown significant improvements of our approach over traditional Kriging.