Forecasting with Geospacial Data

Geostatistics is a subfield of statistics focused on spatial or spatialtemporial datasets, AKA data with location or longitudinal data with location. Fun fact: Many of the techniques we use today originated from mining engineers who desired to know what minerals might lay beyond a surface given a sample.

The goal of this analysis is to determine a variable of interest for patients across various geolocations in the future. In this case, we have a large set of longitudinal data with location, and we want to make guesses about the future in those locations. Not to be confused with kriging which is a gaussian process of estimating a variable at an unobserved location, based on the estimates of nearby or similar locations.