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In probability theory and statistics, the covariance function describes how much two random variables change together (their covariance) with varying spatial or temporal separation. For a random field or stochastic process Z ( x ) on a domain D , a covariance function C ( x , y ) gives the covariance of the values of the random field at the two ...
The sample covariance matrix (SCM) is an unbiased and efficient estimator of the covariance matrix if the space of covariance matrices is viewed as an extrinsic convex cone in R p×p; however, measured using the intrinsic geometry of positive-definite matrices, the SCM is a biased and inefficient estimator. [1]
With any number of random variables in excess of 1, the variables can be stacked into a random vector whose i th element is the i th random variable. Then the variances and covariances can be placed in a covariance matrix, in which the (i, j) element is the covariance between the i th random variable and the j th one.
When the covariance is normalized, one obtains the Pearson correlation coefficient, which gives the goodness of the fit for the best possible linear function describing the relation between the variables. In this sense covariance is a linear gauge of dependence.
The Matérn covariance between measurements taken at two points separated by d distance units is given by [3] = () (),where is the gamma function, is the modified Bessel function of the second kind, and ρ and are positive parameters of the covariance.
The covariance function is a crucial design choice, since it stipulates the properties of the Gaussian process and thereby the behaviour of the model. The covariance function encodes information about, for instance, smoothness and periodicity, which is reflected in the estimate produced.
Importantly, a complicated covariance function can be defined as a linear combination of other simpler covariance functions in order to incorporate different insights about the data-set at hand. The inferential results are dependent on the values of the hyperparameters θ {\displaystyle \theta } (e.g. ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } and σ ...
The covariance function K X satisfies the definition of a Mercer kernel. By Mercer's theorem, there consequently exists a set λ k, e k (t) of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of T K X forming an orthonormal basis of L 2 ([a,b]), and K X can be expressed as