Locally lattice sampling designs for isotropic random fields

Abstract

For predicting $\int_G v(x)Z(x)dx$, where v is a fixed known function and Z is a stationary random field, a good sampling fesign should have a greater density of observations where v is relatively large in absolute value. Designs using this idea when $G = [0, 1]$ have been studied for some time. For G a region in two dimensions, very little is known about the statistical properties of cubature rules based on designs with varying density. This work proposes a class of designs that are locally parallelogram lattices but whose densities can vary. The asymptotic variance of the cubature error for these designs is obtained for a class of isotropic random fields and an asymptotically optimal sequence of cubature rules within this class is found. I conjecture that this sequence of cubature rules is asymptotically optimal with respect to all cubature rules.